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WENDELL PHILLIPS 

From a photograph by J. W. Black, about 1875 



American 
Chivalry 



BY 

LELLIE BUFFUM CHACE WYMAN 

Author of "Poverty Grass," "Interludes," Etc. 



W. B. CLARKE CO. 

BOSTON 

1913 









Copyright, 1913 
By Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman 



Thanks are hereby given heartily to Mrs. Albert P. 
Carter for assistance in preparing the chapter on Elizabeth 
Buffum Chace ; and to Miss Anna Harvey Chace for a 
paragraph concerning John Crawford Wyman, also to 
Francis Jackson Garrison, Miss Sarah J. Eddy, Miss 
Alia W. Foster, Miss Anna Harvey Chace, Mr. A. B. 
Paine, Mr. Frank B. Sanborn, and Harper Brothers for 
some of the illustrations. 



Press of 

Hooper Printing Company 

Boston 



CI.A347952 



7 dedicate this book 
to my son 

Artffttr (Emofarb Wyttmn 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Wendell Phillips .... 1 

Elizabeth Buffum Chace . . 35 

Rebecca Buffum Spring . . 51 

Parker Pillsburt and the Fosters 69 

Sojourner Truth .... 93 

John Crawford Wyman . . 114 

Appendix 145 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Wendell Phillips • Frontispiece v 

Printed by permission of Francis J. Garrison 

Facsimile Letter from Wendell Phillips Facing page 1 

Frank B. Sanborn Facing page 2 

Printed by permission of F. B. Sanborn. 
Frank J. Merriam Facing page 5 

Printed by permission of Miss S. J. Eddy. 
Ann Greene Phillips Facing page 11 

Printed by permission of Francis J. Garrison. 
Francis Jackson Facing page 13 

Printed by permission of Miss Sarah J. Eddy. 
Elizabeth Buffum Chace . Facing page 35 

In photogravure from a painted photograph taken 
when she was fifty years old. 
Samuel Buffington Chace Facing page 40 

In photogravure from a photograph taken when he 
was 56 years old. 
Arnold Buffum Facing page 51 

In photogravure from a pencil sketch made by 
Edward A. Spring a few weeks before Arnold 
Buffum's death. 

Theodore D. Weld Facing page 59 

Three Great Grandsons of Arnold Buffum. . . After page 68 
Abbt Kellet Foster . Facing page 72 

Printed by permission of Francis J. Garrison. 
Frederick Douglass Facing page 80 

From a painting in 1883 by Miss Sarah J. Eddy, 
printed by permission of Miss Eddy. 
Mrs. Lucy Stone Facing page 91 

Printed by permission of Alice Stone Blackwell. 
Wendell Phillips Facing page 104 

Printed by permission of Francis J. Garrison. 
John Crawford Wyman . Facing page 114 

In photogravure, representing him when 57 
years old. 

Emma Willard Wyman Facing page 118 

Residence of John C. Wyman in Valley Falls, 

r I Facing page 128 

Sir Henry Irving Facing page 132 

John Crawford Wyman, aged 75 years Facing page 140 

Joseph H. Twichell Facing page 142 

Printed by permission of Harper & Brothers. 
Facsimile letters from Joseph H. Twichell After page 143 




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WENDELL PHILLIPS 

It was early in the year of 1860; Mr. Phillips 
was driving with Mrs. Elizabeth B. Chace in 
Rhode Island. He said, "I did not mean to 
lecture much this season. I told my wife in 
the Fall that I would stay at home this winter 
and be a very good husband; but then came 
up this Harper's Ferry matter, and I had to 
break my promise and go out. However she 
encouraged me to do it." 

He spoke of having been especially impressed 
by the fact that John Brown's men were will- 
ing to give up their young lives. That seemed 
a more remarkable sacrifice than did the old 
man's surrender of ebbing existence. 

I was a child, too young to realize the serious 
nature of my question; I asked, "Did you 
know beforehand of John Brown's plans ?' 

He answered quietly, yet slightly correcting 
his phrase as he spoke, "I knew there was such 
a man. I did not know he intended to attack 
Harper's Ferry; but I knew he was working 
in such ways. I had seen him. I knew he 
was down there in that vicinity doing some- 
thing about slavery, I did not know exactly 
what." 



2 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

It has been supposed even by persons inti- 
mately acquainted with the inner story of John 
Brown's work that Mr. Phillips knew less of 
it, before the denouement, than several other 
persons in the North; but not even Col. 
Higginson, Mr. Sanborn or Dr. Howe were 
aware of what Mr. Phillips admitted, on that 
evening in 1860, that he knew, before the out- 
break, that John Brown was in the borderland 
between Maryland and Virginia. 

* * * * 

Late in 1861, I passed an evening with Mr. 
Phillips in Providence, where he had come to 
deliver his oration, "The Lost Arts," "They 
asked for that lecture," he said. "I am sure I 
can't imagine why they want it." He was 
always inclined to make fun of this lecture, 
and to wonder at the continued demand for it, 
declaring at about this time that he "had made 
a thousand dollars with it, since he had de- 
termined that he would never allow himself to 
be persuaded to give it again." 

It is very likely however that the committee 
in Providence chose that oration in this season 
from a deliberate desire not to provide him 
with a chance to speak on the Times. His 
talk this evening showed that he was depressed 
about both the political and military situation. 
He thought Lincoln was blind to the signifi- 
cance of events, and he profoundly distrusted 




FRANK B. SANBORN 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 3 

Seward. "If we fail," he said, "we shall be 
under the harrow. I expect that, — but those 
poor contrabands !" He uttered the last words 
in a low tone, with an intense expression of 
sympathy and pity, and he clenched his hands 
as he spoke. This clenching of the 
hands was a characteristic gesture of his, when 
he was deeply moved. Pity was with him an 
indignant sort of passion, and when he felt it 
for persons whom he considered to be the 
victims of injustice, there was something 
terrific in the way he said little or nothing at 
all, but seemed to become a silent spirit of 
anguish for the sufferer and judgment upon 
the offender. 

* * * * 

During my school-girl period, he once ad- 
vised me as to methods of self education, say- 
ing, "I have kept up my studies by myself. I 
have let my Greek go, but I have never failed 
to read a Latin Classic through each year since 
I left college. I know some German, — not 
much. The way to read French is to read it 
without mental translation into English." His 
general remarks implied that he had an easy 
mastery of the French language. At another 
time, he told me, with some amusement, of the 
way his class in college had evaded the study of 
Spanish, by beguiling their instructor, who was 
"an old European revolutionist," to talk 



4 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

through the recitation hours about Revolu- 
tionary themes and experiences. "There was 
one whole term" he said, "in which we did not 
have a single real recitation. We did not 
learn a great deal of Spanish," he admitted. 
It is interesting in view of the later life of 
this great moral revolutionist, to imagine the 
scenes in that Harvard class room, when in 
the first third of the nineteenth century, the 
Boston boy listened to the eager talk and 
strange stories of the old European of that 
period. 

* * * * 

All testimony as to Mr. Phillips's behavior 
in the presence of mobs shows him to have 
been possessed of superb physical courage, 
and endowed on such occasions with a fineness 
of manner which bore shining witness to the 
gentlemanly quality in his blood. One of my 
friends saw him face an infuriated New York 
mob. He stood on the platform, controlling 
their passions, as if the emotions of men were 
his playthings, alternately rousing his listeners 
to rage by some defiant utterance of opinions 
that they hated, and exciting them to laughter 
by his wit. Once some of the leaders rushed 
forward; cut a curtain rope and cried out that 
they would hang him. "Oh, wait a minute," 
said he quietly, "till I tell you this story." 
On that May day of 1863, when the 54th 




F. J. MERRIAM 

One of John Brown's Men 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 5 

Massachusetts Regiment made up of colored 
soldiers marched out of Boston under the lead- 
ership of Colonel Shaw, the remnant of one of 
the first regiments sent to the front many 
months before, came back to the city. I saw 
both processions, that of the homeward bound 
veterans, and that of the men who were to 
go forth and prove the quality of an untried 
race. I was with Mr. Garrison, his daughter, 
and a party of friends in Mr. Phillips' house, 
when the colored regiment swept through Essex 
Street. We waited its coming in a room which, 
so far as I ever knew the house, appeared 
to be at once the reception room and Mr. 
Phillips' study. It contained as its most 
prominent furniture a large table, covered 
with pamphlets and other papers, a big sofa, 
a bust of John Brown and another of one of 
the Bowditch family. Mr. Phillips was not 
present with us, but Mr. Garrison found 
him finally, and got permission to take the 
bust of John Brown out on the balcony. Miss 
Garrison steadied the pedestal, and the bust 
of the Harper's Ferry hero was placed on 
it, and her father stood beside the young girl 
as she held it firm while the regiment went 
by. Some of the officers lifted their hats to 
the great abolitionist, his daughter and to 
the symbol of a consecration like their own. 
Mr. Phillips, meanwhile, was in the room 
above with his wife, watching the soldiers. 



6 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

I give the following extracts from a letter 
written in May, 1864, when I was a school- 
girl. They refer to a much perturbed con- 
vention of the New England Anti-slavery 
Society. 

"The meeting opened, officers were chosen 
and committees appointed. Mr. Quincy, of 
course, was chairman. He seemed much as 
usual, most decidedly the right man in the 
right place, well versed in rules, impartial, 
dignified. Mr. Garrison sat on the platform, 
and near him, Phillips. Thompson was pres- 
ent, but excused himself from speaking be- 
cause of ill-health. Nobody came forward to 
speak, though those wont to speak were there. 
Mr. Phillips looked serious, a trifle anxious, 
perhaps. A manifest reluctance to commence 
a discussion that must be stormy kept them 
silent. The hall rang with calls for 'Phillips, 
Phillips,' but with unmoved countenance that 
gentleman sat still. Mr. Garrison touched 
him with his umbrella, but made no impres- 
sion. Still the call sounded. Mr. Garrison 
at last spoke to Phillips, who shook his head, 
and Mr. Garrison got up and said, the spirit did 
not move Mr. Phillips, and they must wait till 
it did. One or two short addresses followed 
before Mr. Foster opened the discussion of the 
Presidential campaign. The ice was broken and 
in they went ! Mr. Phillips went into an inner 
room connected with the platform, or stood on 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 7 

the end of it at some distance from the speakers 

Charles Burleigh spoke very finely 

Then came more wild calls for Phillips, who 
looked more propitious than before, but stood 
still, perhaps to increase his value when he did 
come. Quincy got up to try and quiet the up- 
roar. 'Mr. Phillips,' he said, 'would come if 
he chose to and wouldn't if he didn't.' A. 
says they all treat Mr. Phillips as if he were a 
baby, and it must be confessed he has his 
caprices. Rather rough handling for a 'baby' 
he got before that convention was through. 

"At last Mr. Phillips began to move forward, 
but by his delay he had lost the chance. Mr. 
Wright had the floor. Mr. Phillips came on, 
till suddenly perceiving, he stepped aside with 
a gesture of apology. . . . Mr. Burleigh and 
Mr. Phillips, as I said, were standing side by 
side. In front and between them sat Mr. 
Garrison, and the three formed a triangle of 
remarkable faces in perfect repose, — Mr. 
Burleigh with his face so like the portraits of 
Christ, Mr. Phillips looking statue-like in the 
immobility of his Roman features, and be- 
tween and below both, the purely American 
face of William Lloyd Garrison," 

The letter goes on to tell that during one 
session a man got up in the back of the hall 
and attacked Mr. Phillips in terms that seemed 
to imply that the orator had been criticising 
Lincoln "like a blackguard," and when a wild 



8 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

uproar of disapproval greeted the insinuation, 
the man retracted so far as to say, "I grant Mr. 
Phillips that he is a gentleman," a retraction 
which caused much laughter, in which Mr. 
Phillips joined. The critic in the audience 
continued his remarks undaunted, and finally 
said, quoting from a speech that a young man 
had made in another meeting in Boston that 
same anniversary week, "If Wendell Phillips 
would do as Lincoln did, kneel down and ask 
counsel of God, he would change his opinions.' ' 
After this speech was done, Samuel May of 
Leicester, Massachusetts, "came forward, say- 
ing he considered this remark 'a piece of in- 
expressible cant' — cheers and hisses — 'of 
inexpressible cant/ repeated Mr. May. 'What 
right had that man to drag Wendell Phillips 
praying or not praying before a Boston audi- 
ence? It was the same thing as saying that 
Mr. Phillips had gone through all his work of 
thirty years without a God. Surely there was 
no man in the country who had shown more 
conclusively that God had been with him in 
his life than Wendell Phillips. Everybody 
knew that Mr. Phillips was orthodox, of the 
Old South Church orthodoxy. If he did not 
pray, who had been his teachers ?' As mother 
and I," continues the letter, "were coming out 
[of the hall], we heard a man say, 'I know what 
kind of praying Wendell Phillips does. He 
sends food to the hungry and clothing to the 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 9 

naked, — and I know it, for I've carried them 
for him.' " 

Some romantic stories were told of Mr. 
Phillips' marriage in his early youth to Ann 
Greene. It was said that he fell in love with 
her at first sight and that she converted him to 
abolitionism, but apparently the seeds of his 
future opinions had been sown before he met 
this ardent girl Garrisonian, for he told a friend 
that he and Charles Sumner expected to be 
introduced to Ann at the same time, and that 
Sumner and he disputed as to which was the 
more likely to win her favor. "Charles," 
said Mr. Phillips, "claimed that he had the 
better chance because he had read the Libera- 
tor longer than I had, — but when the time 
came, I went and Charles didn't." 

Mrs. Phillips' health failed before her mar- 
riage, and though she experienced a temporary 
recovery during the first years of their union, 
she led for from thirty to forty years what was 
practically a shut-in life. We younger folk 
of the anti-slavery clan used to hear her spoken 
of as if she were a sort of Egeria, away from 
all mortal eyes and ears, save those of her 
husband, whose thought and action she was 
said to inspire and guide. That strenuous 
natured woman, Abby Kelley Foster, was one 
of the few intimate friends who saw her more 
or less often. Mrs. Foster had an intense ad- 
miration for her. She considered her to be 



10 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

gifted with an almost super-human faculty for 
sympathy and tenderness. "You never have 
to tell her anything," said Mrs. Foster, "she 
seems to know everything without being told." 

Once when he and she must have been 
towards sixty years old, I asked Mr. Phillips 
what he really meant by his customary reply 
to inquirers that his wife was "about as usual." 
He meant, he said, that she was able to enjoy 
looking out of the window upon Essex Street, 
where she saw a good deal of the stir of life. 
This enjoyment of hers in watching the pass- 
ing wagons and other vehicles was the reason 
they preferred to reside on that street after it 
had become a thoroughfare. Sometimes, he 
continued, she came down stairs to the floor 
below her bedroom and looked around the 
house, but she never stayed an hour outside of 
her own chamber, and never took a meal out 
of it. I have heard that he ate all of his meals 
with her at her bedside but he did not tell me 
so. "She was a very lively, high-spirited 
girl," he said, "when I first knew her. It is as 
if she had acquired some brightness and force 
in those days which has stayed by and borne 
her up through all these years." 

Of course there was another part of the 
story, — a daily sacrifice by him of social 
gayety, of home comfort and personal freedom 
in little things. 

I myself, saw Mrs. Phillips twice, the first time 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 11 

during my school days. Mrs. Foster wanted me 
to see her, and arranged it with Mr. Phillips. 
"It's a sight," he said with tender humor, "to 
see Ann." She made much the same impres- 
sion on my mind, both times I saw her, though 
there was an interval of fully fifteen years be- 
tween the visits. She lay on a bed in a small 
room, but during the first visit she sat up and 
looked with frank eagerness over a box of 
flowers which was brought to her, and before 
I left, she got up on her feet for a few minutes. 
She was of medium size and had bright brown 
hair, very delicate features and the waxen 
complexion that betokens the indoor life of the 
invalid. She had a naive, girlish way of speak- 
ing. I fancied that her seclusion from society 
had left her manner unchanged through all 
her maturer years from what it had been in 
the gay days of early love and hope, when she 
and her brilliant lover had been together in 
the outer world. It struck me that she had 
lived in an atmosphere so free from criticism 
that she had never tried to modify herself. 
"We are one, you know," she said simply and 
sweetly, speaking of herself and her husband. 

Once during the winter of 1865-6, 1 acciden- 
tally met Mr. Phillips, on a railroad train. I 
was a school girl, and he treated me with play- 
ful kindliness, but as a child to whom he might 



12 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

when he was tired of talking, say calmly, 
"Now I am going to read," and having said it, 
proceed to suit action to word, while I, feeling 
that my good time was over, submissively 
gazed out of the window. During this trip of 
an hour, however, he said several notable 
things to me and made some rather intimate 
revelation of his inner moods. 

He spoke of the wedding which he had re- 
cently attended of Mr. Garrison's daughter 
Fanny to Henry Villard, "It was very pleasant," 
he said. "I saw Garrison in the hall, as I went 
in. I am very glad his life is ending so happily 
and so full of honor. He seems wholly at rest. 
I am very much impressed by his serenity 
every time I see him. It is as if he were living 
in an atmosphere of peacefulness." 

During the early Reconstruction period 
much difference of opinion arose and con- 
tinued to prevail between Mr. Phillips and 
several other prominent Abolitionists as to 
men and measures connected with the nation- 
building task. This difference affected their 
views of their own duty both as to conduct and 
the disposal of trust monies which were in their 
charge. Some personal bitterness and aliena- 
tion followed as an inevitable result. Colonel 
Higginson told Miss Forten and myself that 
he once saw Edmund Quincy deliberately 
turn his back on Mr. Phillips in the Ticknor 
Building. "It seemed to me," commented 



FRANCIS JACKSON 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 13 

Col. Higginson, "the saddest thing I ever saw." 

It must have been at about the time this 
incident occurred, that Mr. Phillips was a 
guest over night in Mrs. Chace's house. As 
he was preparing to ascend the staircase, he 
broke into sudden speech. Nothing whatever 
had been said to lead up to such a confidence, 
when he exclaimed, "Oh I don't think that 
there is much satisfaction to be gotten out of 
this life." 

"Thee shouldn't feel so" said Mrs. Chace. 

The tears came into his eyes, as he answered, 
"Half the men I worked with for thirty years 
will not speak to me when they meet me on the 
street." 

"That is hard, I know," she half whispered. 

He steadied himself and went on quietly, 
"I was talking the other day with my friend 
Mrs. Eddy, and I told her that I believed if 
her father (Francis Jackson) were living he 
would understand me now." 

A strain of melancholy in Mr. Phillips became 
apparent to me during this general period, and 
although I saw him afterwards seem very cheer- 
ful, the impression that he was sorrowful in his 
later life remains with me still. 

This effect, as of one who felt himself at odds 
with those who should have been his natural 
comrades, and who was reluctant to speak 
what emphasized such difference, was once 
strangely manifest when, at the Radical Club, 



14 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

he defended the theory of the supernatural 
origin of Christianity. He wholly believed 
this theory, but it seemed to me that he very 
much disliked to take part in the discussion of 
it with men like John Weiss and Dr. Bartol 
who disagreed with him, although they then 
treated him with reverence. I may have mis- 
understood his nature, but from what I saw of 
him, I entirely dissent from a current opinion 
that Wendell Phillips enjoyed the antagonistic 
element in what he once called his "Arab life, 
his hand against every man, and every man's 
hand against his." 

I believe that he was a man who loved to 
love and loved to be beloved. 

* * * * 

Mr. Phillips ran up gaily once on the Com- 
mon, "Won't you stop and speak to anybody ?" 
he cried. 

The answer came, "We are going to Mrs. 
Sargent's to meet you." 

"I am on my way to be met," he laughed, 
"well, we'll have the reception begin now, I 
find it pleasant to be met." 

As we walked on, he spoke of Mrs. Liver- 
more. I said, "She does something to an audi- 
ence like what you do. Most orators either 
coax, excite or argue with an audience. She 
simply stands before it and takes it up quietly 
in her hands, turns it around as if it were a 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 15 

plaything, and makes it behave as she wants 
it to, and she acts from the beginning as though 
she had not the least fear that she could not. 
You do that, only a great deal better than she 
does." "Ah!" he almost sighed, "I wish I 
thought I did it half as well as she." 

Mrs. John T. Sargent gave that day a noon 
reception to celebrate the official close of his 
work as leader of the American Anti-Slavery 
Society through the Reconstruction period, 
in the struggle to obtain for the negro political 
equality with the white man. 

Eight years later I told him that it had been 
noticed at Brown University that in competi- 
tive declamation, any student was certain to 
win the prize who chose for recitation a passage 
from one of his speeches. "The professors 
say," I added, "that there seems to be some- 
thing about your speeches which gives advant- 
age to the reciter. They do not know what it 
is; do you?" 

He answered, "It is because mine are speak- 
ing sentences. They were composed to be 
spoken." 

* * * * 

After an absence of twelve years, Moncure 
D. Conway came back to this country in 1875-6. 
A few evenings after his arrival in Boston, I, 
having had much previous acquaintance with 
him, chanced to meet him at a reception, 



16 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

and the meeting had a significance for the 
full comprehension of which a little history 
must be told. 

Mr. Conway went to England in the spring 
of 1863. He was unofficially sent there by 
some of the Radical Anti-Slavery men in 
this country, because it was believed that 
his testimony to the rightfulness of the North- 
ern cause in the Civil War, would have great 
influence in England on account of his being 
himself a Virginian. He went intending 
to stay about three months. Mason, the 
rebel envoy, was then in London. There 
was reason to fear that Parliament would 
soon recognize the Southern Confederacy. 
The pro-slavery party in England were rally- 
ing their forces to bring about such recognition, 
but probably most of them desired to mask 
their sympathy with slave-holders as such, 
and much effort was making to disguise the 
real purport of the war to the English masses. 
It was comparatively easy to represent the 
war as merely a conflict between two slave- 
holding bodies, since Mr. Lincoln and Mr. 
Seward had, in 1861, so represented it to the 
English ministry; and Lincoln's later Eman- 
cipation Proclamation had been long de- 
layed; and had as yet procured no emancipa- 
tion within the rebel lines, while it left slavery 
untouched in several technically loyal States. 
At the time when Mr. Conway arrived in 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 17 

London, some opinion prevailed that the 
South itself, if victorious and really national- 
ized, was quite as likely to abolish slavery, as 
the North was. Desiring to "unmask" Ma- 
son on this subject, and make him show his 
true colors, Mr. Conway hastily wrote a 
letter to him, and sent it on the very day 
that the idea of doing so had occurred to 
him in consequence of a talk with Robert 
Browning, who had said that he thought 
great good would come if the English people 
could be shown clearly that the South had 
no Anti-slavery purpose and that the North 
was not waging a war merely for conquest. 

The letter, so hurriedly conceived and pre- 
pared by Mr. Conway, contained what was 
morally simply a verbal error in phrase. He 
asked Mason to say whether the Southern 
Confederacy would, through the adjudica- 
tion of some properly chosen European na- 
tion, pledge itself to abolish slavery, if it be- 
came a recognized nation, and he said that 
he was in England as a representative of 
the Abolitionists who would oppose the con- 
tinuance of the war, if the South would thus 
inaugurate emancipation. 

Within twenty-four hours, Mr. Conway 
realized that he had over-stated his author- 
ity to say what "the Abolitionists" would do 
if, the slavery issue being removed by 
Southern abolition, the war became merely 



18 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

one for Union on the one side and disunion 
on the other. He wrote to Mr. Mason 
that he had made the proposition 
simply in his own person. Mr. Mason wrote 
to him a letter which practically declared 
that the South would not abolish slavery, 
and then immediately published his letter 
and Mr. Conway's first one. He undoubtedly 
did this hoping thus to embroil Mr. Con- 
way with the Abolitionists and the Abolition- 
ists with the Federal Government. But Ma- 
son was "hoist with his own petard," for his 
own letter revealed the pro-slavery purpose 
of the rebels who had sent him to England, 
and helped to dispel the delusion as to the 
true character of the Southern Duessa whom 
Englishmen had been trying to fancy was Una. 
Not long afterwards Parliament refused to 
recognize the Southern Confederacy. 

Mr. Conway however was left in an un- 
fortunate position. He had not realized that 
in writing to Mason, a fellow-Virginian with 
himself, and making such a proposition, he 
was technically opening a treasonable ne- 
gotiation with an accredited rebel against 
his own country. The matter was taken up 
by our Minister in England, referred to 
Mr. Seward in this country, and brought to 
Lincoln's attention. Mr. Conway held him- 
self in readiness to return to America and 
meet the consequences, but Mr. Lincoln and 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 19 

Mr. Seward behaved sensibly, and decided 
that there need be no consequences, if noth- 
ing further happened. Mr. Conway then took 
a position as preacher and remained in Eng- 
land. 

In this country there was some diversity of 
opinion as to Mr. Conway's conduct. The 
first account of his correspondence with Ma- 
son came cut and garbled across the ocean, and 
his error seemed greater than it really was, in 
having made the unauthorized statement that 
he was empowered by the Abolitionists to say 
that they would not countenance a war merely 
for the Union. Some persons even thought 
that his offer was a disguised effort to get the 
Confederacy recognized with slavery estab- 
lished and confirmed. Conway had helped to 
free forty of his father's slaves before Lincoln's 
proclamation had freed them, but still, it was 
not strange that in that period of 1863, his own 
anti-slavery principle was doubted for a time. 
Moreover, had his letter been taken quite 
seriously by the Federal authorities, I suppose 
that Secretary Stanton might have sent Mr. 
Garrison or Mr. Phillips to Fort Lafayette on 
the evidence which it furnished, that they 
were negotiating through Conway with the 
rebels. 

I had not known or had forgotten the exact 
attitude which each one of the prominent Aboli- 
tionists concerned had taken in 1863 towards 



20 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

Mr. Conway, and on this evening in Boston, 
I stood with him in a large, nearly empty 
parlor facing the door. I asked him a few 
questions and his answers made me know 
that he had been in the city three or four days, 
and had received no social overtures, except 
the invitation to this reception, and I be- 
came also very sure that he had not been 
sought out personally for welcome by any of 
those persons whose attention and welcome 
would mean some vital interest in his return 
home. 

At the moment I had come to this conclu- 
sion, I saw a figure in the outer hall, which 
was as crowded as the room where we stood 
was empty. 

"There is Mr. Phillips," I said, "Have 
you seen him?" 

"Not till now," answered Mr. Conway in a 
low tone ; — and the man of whom he spoke was 
renowned for never condoning a sin against 
freedom! As I have said I had forgotten 
Mr. Phillips' attitude in that long past war- 
time, and Mr. Conway's answer filled me 
with instant apprehension that embodied 
judgment and doom were approaching us. 

I ventured another question, "Have you 
heard from him?" 

"No," said Mr. Conway. 

"You know him?" I asked. 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 21 

Almost in a whisper he answered, "Oh, I 
knew him — long ago." 

At this moment, Mr. Phillips freed himself 
from the throng, came into the room, and 
seemed to bring with him "the splendor that 
was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome," 
there being something even more than usually- 
magnificent in the appearance of the red-haired, 
blue-eyed old Patrician as he entered. 

Mr. Conway stood motionless and without 
a gleam of recognition in his glance. I 
think I stepped forward a little, but cer- 
tainly Mr. Phillips turned his eyes from Con- 
way, the instant he crossed the threshold, 
and came directly towards me. He took my 
hand, bowing with a decided gesture of 
courtesy, saying, "So you are here!" 

"Mr Phillips." I said immediately, "This 
is Mr. Conway ! — This is Moncure Conway." 

Mr. Conway made no movement which ac- 
knowledged the mention of his name. Mr. 
Phillips did not look at him, but with a peculiar 
directness of address to myself, said, 

"Oh, I don't need any introduction to him. 
I know Mr. Conway. He's the man to whom 

F 's guards all lowered their weapons 

when he marched up to them saying '/ am a 
Virginian.' " 

Mr. Phillips spoke the last words with dra- 
matic exaggeration of emphasis, wheeling 
around as he did so to face Mr. Conway, who 



22 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

suddenly sprang forward with a glad leap. 
He caught Mr. Phillips' hand. He laughed, 
he stammered out exclamations; — Mr. 
Phillips threw back his head, and his laughter 
which was like a musical cascade, flooded 
through the room. The two men stood clasp- 
ing hands for a perceptible time. 

"That was about the funniest thing I ever 
saw," cried Mr. Conway. 

"It was about the cleverest thing I ever 
saw," responded Mr. Phillips and they stood 
laughing and ejaculating, till I cried a little 
petulantly, "But / don't know what you 
men are talking about" ! 

Mr. Conway relapsed into complete sil- 
ence. It was not for him to tell of the mo- 
ment when he had done something Mr. 
Phillips could not do, and the latter per- 
ceiving instantly his chance to do the thing 
he most loved to, namely to celebrate a 
friend's achievement, bent his smile on me, 
and explained ; 

"The trial of Anthony Burns was held be- 
hind closed doors. It was done to keep the 
Abolitionists out. So that morning we anti- 
slavery fellows all stood around outside the 
Court House, just wild to know what was 
going on, and not one of us had a pass and 
could get in. Conway went to the sentinels 
themselves who stood at the door. He did not 
state his opinion, he merely said, 'I'm a Vir- 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 23 

ginian, will you let me in?' They supposed, 
of course, that he was on the slave claimant's 
side. They knew the reason for the prohibi- 
tion. They took the responsibility on them- 
selves and let him in. Then he made report 
to us of what was happening." 

Of course, I know now that Mr. Phillips 
had come into that room to greet Mr. Con- 
way, and had only taken me incidentally 
on the way, because I was the girl in the 
scene, and possibly also to relieve a momen- 
tary embarrassment of his own; but my in- 
troducing the two men as though they were 
strangers, in order to force a friendly greeting 
from Mr. Phillips, must have been an action 
for which he had not prepared himself, and 
it still seems to me, that his sudden grasp of 
the situation and his immediate reference 
to the old Fugitive Slave time, when he 
and Mr. Conway had stood shoulder to 
shoulder, years before the Mason imbroglio, 
was the most tactful and most masterful 
social thing which I ever saw done. I know, 
however, that I have not here told the story 
well enough to do justice to either of the two 

men. 

* * * * 

Nearly twenty years after the fugitive 
slave Sims and the rights of the Common- 
wealth had both been tried and both been 
condemned to bondage within its walls, I 



24 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

met Mr. Phillips opposite the Boston Court 
House. Clad in gray, he stood, in his haughty 
beauty, upon the gray stones of that Boston 
pavement, "over which" his "mother had 
held up" his "baby footsteps," and he flung 
out his arm with a mighty movement, say- 
ing, "That is where I saw the chains stretched 
around the Court House!" 

The memory of these words and of the 
emotion they displayed rendered it impos- 
sible for my husband and myself, as Wendell 
Phillips' friends, to accept the offered cour- 
tesies of Gen. Devens who had drawn those 

chains. 

* * * * 

It must have been about the year 1876 
that I happened to be alone with Mr. Phillips. 
I said without preface, "Mr. Phillips, how the 
papers have been pitching into you, lately! 
You are not very popular just now." 

He answered good-humoredly, but with 
emphasis, "No, I am not in the least popular." 

"Why are you so intimate with Butler?" I 
inquired. 

"Well," he said, "There is an old saying 
that you must fight fire with fire; and some- 
times, when you are struggling with very 
savage forces, the best man you can use for 
the purpose is one whose original nature is a 
little like that of the enemy. Butler is that 
man today in this country. He is just the one 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 25 

to fight those fellows on the other side, and this 
Reconstruction trouble is not ended. It is 
coming up all the time, and showing itself in 
the most unexpected places. He is doing work 
about it — all the time. Yes, that is why I am 
intimate with him. That is what the inti- 
macy really is. That is under it all. Oh, I 
know what kind of a man he is ! I am not at 
all deceived in him." 

* * * * 

Mr. Phillips called on Mrs. Chace and my- 
self in New York, in the early winter of 1878-9. 
He was on his way home from a lecturing trip. 
He appeared depressed, and there were silent 
moments during his visit. When he was going 
away, we followed him into the hall. He 
turned back towards us at the head of the stair- 
case, and said in an appealing tone, which 
tried not quite successfully to be playful: 

"You must make much of me while you 
have the chance, — you will not have me long." 

"Thee is getting to be an old man now," 
said Mrs. Chace, "Ought thee to be going 
around lecturing ?" 

"No," he answered," I am not well enough 
to lecture and I ought not to have it to do." 

"Does thee have to ?" she asked. The words 
seemed to burst from his lips, "Yes," he said 
desperately, adding very passionately, "And 
it is not right that I should." 



26 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

An instant of awed silence ensued, then he 
spoke a hasty farewell, as if to prevent further 
speech on the subject, and descended the stairs. 

After his death five years later I first learned 
that he was really a poor man working from 
money need, and that at the time of this visit 
he knew himself to be stricken by a mortal 
malady. 

A little more than a year after this New York 
call he came to see Mrs. Chace and myself in 
Boston. It was a morning visit, he was very 
scrupulously well dressed; he sat easily in a 
large chair; he seemed like a society man 
making a slightly formal call on mere ac- 
quaintances between whom and himself there 
were no such past experiences as those which 
had once made him write to Mrs. Chace, "We 
have had so many joys and sorrows in common 
that now what saddens or rejoices the one of 
us must touch the other." 

He led the conversation, which, indeed, be- 
came under his mastery, very nearly a mono- 
logue, although, so far as I knew his talk, mono- 
logue was not his usual method. 

Very soon some inner passion rushed out- 
ward in his speech. "We have a strange fate 
here," he said, and proceeded rapidly to tell 
how five or six of his kinsmen had died in an 
instant. 

"My father sat down in his chair, — and 
was gone." Several such incidents, he related, 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 27 

throwing them forth from his lips, like bitter 
challenges to the Universe itself. 

At last Mrs. Chace, who also believed her- 
self smitten with mortal illness and dreaded a 
long suffering, spoke in a gentle tone, saying, 
"I think it is a beautiful way to die." 

Something in her words or manner affected 
this mercurial natured man. He became soft 
and humanly resigned to fate. He said only, 
"Yes, I think so," to her declaration that sud- 
den death was comforting to expect, but his 
words and manner had wholly lost the mad- 
dened element which a moment previously 
had been their marked characteristic. 

A year later, he was with us again for a 
morning hour. He talked happily and quietly, 
once in a while touching gravely on some seri- 
ous topic, but briefly, as though he preferred 
a strain of comment on lighter matters. 

"I don't do anything now," he said, but not 
sadly, "I don't go anywhere. I have been 
into my cousin's house a few times, but I have 
not done anything that was regularly social, I 
have not made a visit since I called here last 
year." 

"Did you ever have a loan repaid ?" he 
asked. "I don't mean a large loan, or one of 
a business nature. I mean the small sum of 
money that you lend to help a person out of 
some special difficulty. I have made many 
such loans, and I was never repaid, — Oh 



28 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

yes, I was once. That was a funny case. 
A friend asked me if I could lend him some 
money, I said, 'Oh yes,' and gave it to him. 
But having got it he did not go off, and he 
looked very much troubled. He said, 'Mr. 
Phillips, I can't give you a note.' He was a 
financial crank, and that was his notion — that 
it was wrong to give notes. He said, T hope 
you don't mind.' I said 'No, indeed.' He 
said, 'I shall pay you just the same. It won't 
make any difference, my not giving you a note. 
I hope you don't mind it?' I said, T don't 
mind at all not having a note. I'm sure it 
won't make any difference about your paying 
me.' I didn't think it would," laughed Mr. 
Phillips, telling the story. "I hadn't an idea 
he would ever pay. So, at last, I got him 
comforted, and he went away with the dollars. 
And that man paid that debt. It was my 
only case." 

"I have had two such debts paid me," said 
some one. 

"Then you have been twice as fortunate as 
I," answered the man who before his death 
cancelled every such note he held. 

"Doubtless," he said this morning, "An 
enlightened and conscientious oligarchy would 
provide the government that would produce 
the best result of immediate order, — if you 
could be sure of your oligarchy. But that's 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 29 

the impossible thing. You cannot get and 
keep such an oligarchy." 

In the June after this talk, Wendell Phillips 
spoke his Phi Beta Kappa oration, made his 
last great plea for universal suffrage and said, 
"Trust the people — the wise and the ignorant, 
the good and the bad — with the gravest 
questions, and in the end you educate the 
race." 

* * * * 

Shortly after both Mr. and Mrs. Phillips 
died it was my fortune to hear Frederick 
Douglass and Susan B. Anthony talk together 
of the dead orator. The voice of Douglass 
came brokenly from his expressive mouth, as 
he spoke of the time when Wendell Phillips 
had walked a steamboat deck with him all 
night, refusing to go below and take a berth, 
because such accommodation was denied to 
Douglass on account of his color. It was 
thrilling to hear the old man, then honored 
and accepted, in spite of that color, tell of that 
companionship in hardship, when he was 
young and despised, and his comrade was 
beautiful in self-sacrificing youth. "That's 
the sort of thing a man never forgets," he 
murmured. 

Miss Anthony's reminiscence on this occa- 
sion gave a different picture from that sug- 
gested by Douglass, but the man of whom she 



30 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

told was the same in old age as Douglass had 
shown him to be in his splendid youth, — 
one who sought to bear another's burden. 
She said that she had a talk with Mr. Phillips 
some time within the last two or three years of 
his life. He said to Miss Anthony, "I remem- 
ber seeing my grandfather look out of the win- 
dow at my grandmother's funeral, and hearing 
him say, 'I thank God I have lived to see her 
go first!' I did not understand his feeling 
then, but I know now what it was. I have 
lived to have every hope and desire merge it- 
self and be lost in the one wish that I may 
outlive Ann." 

That wish was not granted. He died and 
left his wife to the chances of care from others. 
This was given, however, by friends and rela- 
tives, and the household upon which her com- 
fort depended was maintained until her death, 
about two years after his. 

One of the pretty stories told of Mr. Phillips 

is that he found pleasure in stealing up to 

children whom he saw gazing with wistful 

hopelessness into shop windows, and slipping 

money into their hands. "I think," said the 

person who related this, "if they see his 

face as he passes, they must think it is that of 

an angel." 

* * * * 

I saw him about eight months before the 
February day when he murmured that he was 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 31 

sorry to trouble any one to lift and care for 
him and sorry, so sorry for "poor Ann." 

In this hour with me, he was very sweet, 
easily soothed yet deeply troubled. 

"I have a poor old friend," he said, "a 
crippled soldier. He cannot do many kinds 
of work. He has had a little governmental 
office. Now the Civil Service Rules have 
been applied to such positions as his. He has 
lost the place. I don't know what will become 
of him. I am anxious about him. 

"It does not seem to me that things are man- 
aged quite rightly for us down here. I have 
been very much depressed." 

I suddenly perceived that he was expressing 
doubt of the Divine government of the world. 

"Oh, Mr. Phillips," I begged, "Don't let 
that mood be the end of your life. Don't 
feel that way." 

"Well, I have felt so," he answered as 
simply as a little child. 

He smiled at last, such a smile as I have 
seldom seen, so radiant was it with angelic 
glory, so lovely was it in its humanity. I never 
saw his living countenance again. 

* * * * 
After this last meeting came these letters. 

16th Aug. 
My dear Mrs. Wyman: 

Don't think I forgot you or could neglect 



32 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

your wish or your letter. But my wife 
nas been so ill for the last three months that I 
have done nothing but help nurse her. She 
is helpless; does not lift her head from the 
pillow without aid, cannot stand. We took 
her in arms to the carriage to drive out here to 
Waverly. But you shall not be forgotten. 
Something from the home of forty years and 
the picture Black insisted on taking, I will 
see you have in due time. 

Do excuse this long delay and silence .... 
Faithfully yours, 

Wendell Phillips. 

My dear Mrs. Wyman: 

Did I not promise and is not Xmas with its 
merrie greeting just the time to keep promises ? 
If I promised anything more, please remind 
me, by which means I shall have the pleasure 
of seeing your sign manual. 

My poor wife lies patient in weary helpless- 
ness, and my employment and pleasure is 
waiting on her. 

All loving messages of the season for mother, 
John, and the baby. 

Thine, 

Wendell Phillips. 

* * * * 

He was the prophetic champion of moral 
duty. He not only fulfilled the ideal of 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 33 

Lowell's verse, and sided with Truth when to 
do so was to share "her wretched crust," he 
turned from the feasts that both Ambition and 
Possession spread freely before his youth. He 
did more; in middle life and again in age, he 
went out from the harvest fields whose growth 
of fruitage had arisen from his sowing to yield 
to him their plenty. He sought Truth in the 
desert where she had not even a crust to offer 
him. He laid at her feet the sheaves of his 
planting and reaping, and he went a-hungered 
at her side, contented himself, because he had 
strengthened her for her onward march. Then 
he laid down his weary head, and the heart 
which he had broken injhe service of humanity 
ceased its pained throbbing. 

What was it that he had said in his mighty 
recessional chant? I reverently borrow his 
phrase, but I, also with deepest reverence, 
substitute his own name for the one which his 
lips uttered and say, "Wendell Phillips, in my 
judgment the noblest human being who ever 
walked the streets of yonder city, — I do not 
forget Franklin or Sam Adams, Washington 
or Payette, Garrison or John Brown, — but 
Phillips dwells an arrow's flight above them 
all, and his touch consecrated the continent to 
measureless toleration of opinion and entire 
equality of rights. We are told we can find 
in Plato 'all the intellectual life of Europe for 
two thousand years :' so you can find in Phillips 



34 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

the pure gold of two hundred and fifty years 
of American civilization, with no particle 
of its dross." 




££U.A^#. ££ 



C^d-JL^' 



ELIZABETH BUFFUM CHACE 

Elizabeth Buffum Chace was descended 
from English families who settled in Massa- 
chusetts and Rhode Island, all, so far as known, 
before 1650, and some before 1640. 

She herself was always a very intense Rhode 
Islander in feeling. Her father was Arnold 
Buffum, son of William Buffum who was an 
early abolitionist of the gradual emancipation 
type, the only type existent in that day. 
Arnold Buffum himself became, in 1832, the 
first President of the first society ever formed 
in this country to demand immediate 
emancipation. 

His wife was Rebecca Gould, daughter of 
John Gould, of Newport, R. I., a scholarly 
man, who was proprietor of an estate which 
had been in the possession of the Gould 
family since 1638. 

Elizabeth was the second daughter of Arnold 
and Rebecca Buffum, and was born in Provi- 
dence, Dec. 9, 1806. She was educated at the 
ordinary schools in Smithfield, R. I., and in 
Connecticut and at the Friends' School in 
Providence. When she was seventeen or 
eighteen years old, the family moved to Fall 

35 



36 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

River, where she, at the age of twenty-one, 
married Samuel Buffington Chace, son of 
Oliver and Susan Chace. 

She early became interested in the movement 
for the abolition of slavery, and, under her 
father's influence, she and her husband each 
adopted the principle of Garrison, that slavery 
should be immediately, not gradually, abol- 
ished. Mr. and Mrs. Chace also each re- 
pudiated the colonization scheme. 

During the years between 1832 and 1840, 
there was a female anti-slavery society in Fall 
River in which Mrs. Chace was very active, 
serving for a while as President. The society 
was of course small, and a number of the meet- 
ings were held in her house, her husband being 
in full sympathy with all her efforts. She 
advocated the circulation of petitions and did 
much minor work of a nature that was almost 
domestic; sewing for anti-slavery fairs, and 
keeping a small library of anti-slavery books 
for distribution. 

It is evident from the records of this society 
that none of this work involved her in anything 
like public speaking or presiding in a public 
hall over a mixed assembly of men and 
women. 

During this period she was the mother of 
five children who all died before 1843. She 
afterwards became the mother of five more 
children, who lived to the period of early 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 37 

adolescence, but only three of them survived 
her. 

Mr. and Mrs. Chace moved to her 
native state of Rhode Island in 1840, and from 
that year until 1865, her anti-slavery work was 
obscure, but very important. 

She was the more or less formally recog- 
nized agent for getting up Anti-Slavery meet- 
ings all over the state, outside of Providence 
and Newport, and correspondence, still in ex- 
istence, with the Boston Anti-Slavery office 
shows that she was the important person in 
arranging long courses of Sunday Anti- Slavery 
lectures in Providence. This correspondence 
also shows that she was consulted about a 
large part of the work to be done or attempted 
in Rhode Island. Of course she had much 
local assistance in the state but the letters 
from Boston indicate that her opinion and her 
advice were practically final in the central 
councils of the Garrisonian leaders. It is 
impossible to over-estimate the value of Mrs. 
Chace's unknown work in behalf of the anti- 
slavery movement, and the co-operation of her 
husband in it all. 

She came to the Woman Suffrage movement 
trained by this long schooling and labor in 
anti-slavery propaganda. 

In all consideration of her life work, it must 
be noted that she was a Quaker, not only by 
training but by nature. She severed her con- 



38 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

nection with the Quaker body in 1843, because 
she felt that the Quakers were not true to their 
original principles, especially in their treat- 
ment of the anti-slavery cause. She did not 
leave them because she felt herself no longer a 
Quaker. She felt herself more true to the 
principles of Quakerism than they. She 
passed through various phases of intellectual 
belief as to theological doctrine, but the doc- 
trine of the "Inner Light" was the only philo- 
sophical theory which she considered essential 
to Quakerism. This doctrine she held all her 
life. 

Although while slavery existed, her main 
energies were all directed to its overthrow, 
her name appeared in the Call for the 
Woman's Rights Convention, held in Wor- 
cester in October, 1850. This convention was 
fotten up and presided over by Mrs. Paulina 
Vright Davis who was a very intimate friend 
of Mrs. Chace's. It is a significant fact as to 
the nature of their intimacy that Mrs. Davis, 
when preparing the call for this Convention, 
being in too much of a hurry to communicate 
first with Mrs. Chace, put her friend's name 
upon the Call, and afterwards informed her of 
it, being sure that Mrs. Chace would endorse 
her action. Her name is also on the list of 
members present at that Convention. 

During the early war time, an Association 
was formed by former students of the Provi- 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 39 

dence Friends School, which Mrs. Chace had 
attended in her girlhood. She accepted with 
great pleasure the invitation to go to the second 
meeting of this Association and joined it, glad 
to renew the social ties with her Quaker 
friends which had been broken by her with- 
drawal from the Society. But she noticed that 
the women members were not given any official 
position in the Association. In her own ac- 
count of the affair, she says that she protested 
only privately against this exclusion of women, 
because she was entirely unfitted by nature to 
make public speech on any subject. The 
exclusion continued for one or two years and 
she resigned from the Association, saying that 
she was unalterably attached to the principles 
of the Society of Friends, and she deemed such 
ignoring of the women to be against those 
principles. But she tried, not quite success- 
fully, to withdraw from the Association in a 
manner which would attract no attention be- 
cause, she said, she had so often been 
obliged to take an unpopular position that it 
had become extremely painful to her. 

She evidently felt very keenly this new 
separation from her old friends. She had once 
and apparently only once, spoken a half a 
hundred words, at a Friends' Meeting long 
before, on behalf of the slave, and her record 
of it shows that it cost her a great deal of per- 
sonal pain to do that. She had absolute moral 



40 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

courage, but great social timidity, and extreme 
personal shyness. And yet this was the wo- 
man, who, under a sense of duty, took up the 
Woman's Rights cause, in its most unpopular 
period and carried on its work till the end of 
her life. 

On the 23d day of October, 1868, there 
assembled in Boston a gathering composed 
largely of old abolitionists, who organized the 
New England Woman Suffrage Association. 
Mrs. Chace and Mrs. Paulina W. Davis were 
among the number. They returned home de- 
termined to form a State Society. They went 
together from house to house in Rhode Island ; 
they wrote letters soliciting influence and sig- 
natures to a call which they prepared for a 
convention. Mrs. Chace, herself, invited her 
old abolitionist friends, Stephen and Abby 
Kelley Foster. 

The convention met on December 11th in 
Roger Williams Hall and Mrs. Chace pre- 
sided. The Rhode Island Woman Suffrage 
Association was formed. Mrs. Paulina W. 
Davis was elected president and Mrs. Chace 
was placed on the Executive Committee. 

Mr. Chace's health failed seriously that 
autumn, and the last time he ever went to 
Providence was on the day of this Convention. 
He went into the hall, sat down on a side seat, 
and watched his wife who then, for the first 
time, occupied a prominent position on a public 





<?/'?77^tj&& . 





^?^C^ 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 41 

platform. Himself never a public worker in 
any way, it was evident that he wished to give 
to her work the endorsement of his presence. 

During the next two years, various issues 
divided the Woman Suffragists throughout 
the country. The National Woman Suffrage 
Association had been in existence since early 
in the 1850 decade, and by this time its chief 
leaders were Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony. 
The marriage and divorce question was in- 
troduced by Mrs. Stanton into a Woman's 
Rights meeting in New York in 1860. Mr. 
Phillips opposed its introduction on the theory 
that the topic was irrelevant to the proper ob- 
jects of a "woman's" movement. He said that 
marriage concerned men as vitally as it did 
women. The Stantonites argued, in opposi- 
tion, that the nature of life made the marriage 
institution affect women more essentially than 
men. 

It would be entirely unfair to charge many 
of the persons who favored the discussion of 
marriage questions in Woman's Rights meet- 
ings, with holding objectionable moral opin- 
ions, but the question of whether it was proper 
to admit such discussion was then very serious 
among the different advocates of Woman's 
Rights. There were in both parties 
some honest differences of opinion as to the 
laws which should regulate marriage, and of 
course there were some foolish and immoral 



42 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

ideas held here and there in the rank and file 
of the Woman Suffrage workers. 

Mrs. Chace came gradually to feel that the 
discussion of the marriage question in Woman's 
Rights meetings would lead to the expression 
of obnoxious as well as irrelevant opinion. 

Another cause of difference among the Suf- 
fragists was the question whether they should 
support or oppose the passage of the 15th 
Amendment to the United States Constitution, 
which was not fully ratified until the Spring 
of 1870. Opposition was based on the theory 
that its passage would retard the granting of 
suffrage to women and also that it was a new 
affront to American white women to enfranchise 
the negro first. Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Davis 
were leaders in this opposition. It was pain- 
ful to Mrs. Chace to be brought into a differ- 
ence with her old friend Mrs. Davis. But 
she was faithful to her lifelong belief that it 
was her duty to seek the elevation as well as 
the freedom of the negro. 

The consequence of all these differences was 
the formation of the American Woman Suf- 
frage Association to which, largely as a result 
of Mrs. Chace's decision, the Rhode Island 
society became auxiliary. Mrs. Chace was 
made President of the Rhode Island Society in 
1870, and she held that position until her 
death in 1899. 

Her work in the Society was untiring, and 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 43 

she deemed no effort too trifling. During the 
first years the conventions were large and she 
rejoiced. In later years, when the meetings 
became smaller, she thought it all the more im- 
portant that they should be held, and she 
worked all the harder to get them up. 

When it seemed possible that petitions would 
affect the action of the legislature, she favored 
presenting them. When it seemed that they 
would have no effect, she favored circulating 
them as a means of propaganda among the 
people- 
She did an amount of work in the way of 
writing letters and newspaper articles, which 
would have been astonishing in an unprofes- 
sional woman of any age. In one of her age 
it was almost miraculous. 

She held the office of President of the Ameri- 
can Woman Suffrage Association in 1882, and 
was always an officer in that society, either as 
a Vice-President for Rhode Island or as a mem- 
ber of the Executive Committee. 

In July, 1882, she wrote the remarkable 
letter of which parts are here given : 

Mrs. Chace to Governor A. H. Littlefield. 
"July 24 — The Annual Meeting of the 
Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association is 
to be held early in October, with some of the 
best speakers in the country on its platform. 
This Association will at that time, have ex- 
isted fourteen years, and it has, throughout, 



44 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

sustained a character and exerted an influence, 
such as, in the future, the people of the State 
will learn to appreciate and be proud of. 

"Some of the women among its members, 
have served the state in the few ways which are 
open to women. Many of them contribute 
financially to the support of its institutions, 
and all of them are deeply interested in its 
welfare. 

"For myself, I may be permitted to say that 
both my paternal and maternal ancestors have 
been land holders in Rhode Island since the 
days of its earliest colonial life ; — one of them 
having been the first President of the Aquid- 
neck Colony; — and, through all their suc- 
ceeding generations they have contributed to 
the prosperity of the State, by their active 
participation in its agricultural and manufac- 
turing industries. 

"More than this; most of those of the early 
time, came as exiles for conscience's sake to 
Rhode Island, and aided largely in the estab- 
lishment of that 'Soul liberty' for which our 
State organization has been so justly dis- 
tinguished. 

"In my own person, I have obeyed the laws, 
never refusing or in any way evading the pay- 
ment of the taxes imposed upon me by the 
State. 

"Now, I have a small favor to ask of the 
State of Rhode Island, and I appeal first to 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 45 

you, because at this time you are its highest 
representative, and I want to enlist your ap- 
proval to the granting of my request. 

"I am very desirous that this Annual Con- 
vention should be held in the Hall of our House 
of Representatives; and as soon as I can learn 
to what body of persons a request of this kind 
should be submitted, I intend to make such 
application. Both political parties hold their 
annual conventions there; and it seems to me 
remarkably fitting that the women of the state 
should have some representation in the house 
they have helped to build; to the support|of 
which they have largely contributed. 

"It is true, the State has not endorsed 
Woman Suffrage ; — neither does it endorse 
the principles of the Democratic Party, but it 
acknowledges the citizenship of the members 
of that party and their equal right to such use 
of the property of the State." 

From this time on, Mrs. Chace continued 
to ask for the use of the Legislative Hall, and 
after the first one or two applications, the re- 
quests were granted. 

In this wonderful period of activity after she 
was sixty-two years old, Mrs. Chace carried on 
simultaneously with her Woman Suffrage ef- 
fort, a work in behalf of the unfortunate 
classes in her native state. No woman in 
Rhode Island had ever held any State appoint- 
ment which gave her official relation with the 



46 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

State penal and educational institutions, when 
in about the year 1868, Mrs. Chace began her 
effort to obtain legislative decree that women 
should be placed on state boards of manage- 
ment of institutions in which females were 
confined or given shelter. In connection with 
Miss Phoebe Jackson, she made preliminary 
investigation of the condition of the prisons 
and the reform school ; talked with the inmates, 
keepers, and superintendents and then made 
up her mind what ought to be done and, with 
characteristic determination, proceeded to do 
it. She studied the statute law and finding 
that the act providing for the appointment of 
inspectors of penal institutions did not say 
explicitly that they must be men, she directed 
her first effort to obtain the appointment of 
women without any special legislative action 
on the subject. She enlisted the co-operation 
of the Woman Suffrage Society in this effort, 
but finding that the wise and learned thought 
it would not do to slip women into office in this 
manner, all the workers in the cause decided 
to ask for a special law establishing 
a board of lady visitors to these institutions. 
She induced the Hon. Wm. P. Sheffield to 
draw up a bill which should provide, as nearly 
as was then deemed possible, for the appoint- 
ment of women to official connection with the 
penal and correctional institutions in which 
women and children were confined. In all 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 47 

this work she had the hearty assistance of a 
number of influential women of the reforming 
class, and also of the Hon. Thomas A. Doyle 
who for fifteen years held the office of Mayor 
of Providence. 

The State Legislature made partial conces- 
sion. A bill was passed in 1870, providing for 
the appointment by the Governor of a board 
of lady visitors who should be authorized to 
visit and inspect all penal and correctional 
institutions of which women were inmates, 
and this board was instructed to render an 
annual report to the Legislature, but beyond 
this privilege of making recommendations the 
board had no power. 

Mrs. Chace personally felt rather scornful 
of this legislative sop but she accepted position 
on the powerless board and served faithfully, 
visiting especially the reform school which was 
then situated in Providence. She resigned 
finally when she was a little more than seventy 
years old, feeling that she could use her 
strength better in some other way. She also 
felt that the existence of the board satisfied 
the legislative conscience and delayed the pass- 
age of a law which would provide for the ap- 
pointment of women to more efficient service. 

Mr. Chace died late in 1870; Mrs. Chace's 
youngest son died four months afterwards. 
She was very much exhausted by these ex- 
periences, and in 1872 went abroad for a year 



48 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

and a half of rest and travel. But she did not 
entirely relinquish her special activities even 
during this time. She was a delegate to the 
World's Prison Congress which met in London 
in the summer of 1872. She read there a 
paper urging the appointment of women to 
the management of penal and correctional in- 
stitutions, and, from all evidence now at hand, 
it appears that she and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe 
were the only women who were permitted to 
speak to the Congress assembled as a whole 
body and according to Mrs. Howe's own testi- 
mony, her chance to speak was obtained 
largely through Mrs. Chace's instrumentality. 
She was also a delegate to the Peace Congress 
whieh Mrs. Howe called that summer in 
London. 

Soon after her return to America, Mrs. 
Chace began her work for the establishment 
of a state home and school for dependent chil- 
dren. There had been one or two similar in- 
stitutions in other states, but Mrs. Chace was 
certainly one of the first two or three, if not 
the first person, to move for the establishment 
of such an institution in Rhode Island. She 
memorialized the State Legislature in her own 
person, on this subject. The institution, as 
established, was not quite what she wanted 
as to its management, which was given to a 
board already established for other work, and 
too much overburdened by that work to 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 49 

give proper attention to the new institution. 

When she was about eighty years old, she 
became wholly dissatisfied with the way in 
which the school was conducted, and she called 
for an investigation. One of the Providence 
papers wrote that if Mrs. Chace said that some- 
thing was wrong at the state school, that fact 
alone was enough to make investigation neces- 
sary. A committee was appointed. She 
attended its meetings; she answered inquiries, 
and the practical result was that the changes 
she demanded were made, and a new board of 
management was appointed. 

During the last thirty years of her life, she 
wrote about one hundred articles for the Provi- 
dence Journal, a large proportion of which 
were upon Woman Suffrage and I believe no 
article of hers was ever refused by that paper. 
It was often editorially scornful of such opin- 
ions as those she held, but it treated her per- 
sonally and treated all direct expression and 
noticed action of hers with a respect which, 
as the seasons passed, deepened into a defer- 
ence almost reverential. This feeling of rever- 
ence surrounded her age like a benign atmos- 
phere. 

She printed her Anti-Slavery Reminiscences 
in 1886. She sent a copy to George William 
Curtis, who, in reply, said that "to receive that 
book as a gift from her, was like having a hand 
of benediction laid upon his brow." 



50 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

She was a house-bound invalid during the 
last six years of her life. She wanted to with- 
draw from the presidency of the Woman Suff- 
rage Association, but they preferred to elect a 
vice-president who would do the active work, 
saying in the words of Anna Garlin Spencer, 
thatthe great name of Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 
so long as she lived on earth, should be inscribed 
on their banner as that of their leader. 



REBECCA BUFFUM SPRING 

The fourth daughter of Arnold Buffum was 
Rebecca, born in Providence, R. I., on June 8, 
1811. 

She married Marcus Spring, a New York 
wholesale merchant, who by descent belonged 
in Uxbridge, Massachnsetts. 

Mrs. Spring had a piquant face, which had 
the effect of more beauty than it quite 
possessed. In her character was blended a 
certain imperious frivolity with a fervid earnest- 
ness, which at times amounted almost to 
religious ecstasy. She once revealed herself in 
this latter mood on a steamboat when ship- 
wreck seemed imminent. She moved about 
encouraging, consoling everybody, as if her- 
self sustained by a supernatural influence 
which she, having received, radiated forth. 

Mr. Spring was a handsome, lovable man, 
who had a decidedly artistic endowment. He 
early acquired wealth, and Mrs. Spring easily 
became the richly dressed, luxuriously dis- 
posed woman who was a slightly unusual 
figure among the serious folk, who in that 
half century, were trying Fourieristic experi- 
ments in social salvation. But her character 

51 



52 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

fibre was strong, and her personal ethics suffi- 
cient to the need. She said: "Let us try to 
fill people's minds with pleasant memories," 
and declared that an invalid should answer 
cordially, "I thank you," when greeted with a 
"how do you do," but make no report of health 
if a cheerful one could not be made. 

She became poor in her old age, laughed 
and said: "I am glad that I did not do my 
housework when I was younger. If I had I 
should have used up all my strength and should 
not have it now." 

The following letter was written by Emma 
Willard to Mrs. Spring about two years be- 
fore she married John C. Wyman. It seems 
to me to have some historic value as showing 
what were the thoughts and aspirations of 
high minded young women of that day. In 
this manner it illustrates the character of both 
Mrs. Spring and Emma Willard. 

"Uxbridge, March 16, 1845. 

"Dear Mrs. Spring, * * You have strug- 
gled with a 'dying nature and a despairing 
humanity' and have felt that it was good to 
suffer — that the crown of thorns was indeed 
a regal crown. It is not well always to breathe 
the strong mountain air — we must also walk 
through the valley, and I would not, if I 
could, refuse to suffer. * * * 

"I went to church this morning and heard 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 53 

Mr. Clarke preach and pray — when will men 
remember that God does not hear the long 
prayer? * * * I was struck with the 
thought of a rough, plain, truth-telling indi- 
vidual not long since. He said to me, 'it seems 
quite unnecessary to find a way to God's 
heart by telling him how omnipotent and im- 
portant he is — this sounds to me like soft 
solder, or as if men tried to come it over God?' 
You may not appreciate these cant phrases, 
but I thought there was some force in the idea, 
and it proved to me that the man was a 
thinker. The entire absence of supplication 
in these pulpit prayers is painful to me, and I 
so long for the simple ' Our Father Who art in 
Heaven' — the prayer that, when a child ,1 
thought 'told everything,' seems as full of 
meaning now, and a thousandfold more so, 
than when I repeated the petitions looking the 
while in my mother's face and wondering at 
her great beauty. * * * Her beauty was 
strange to me, and I gazed on her face and 
wished that mine might grow so fair and pure. 
* * * I am glad to know that Margaret 
Fuller is with you, for I love her though from 
afar, and the impulse was strong within me, 
after reading her Woman in the Nineteenth 
Century, to write to her and tell her the good 
I had experienced. The weakest voices lend 
their aid in swelling a full anthem of praise; 
and will she give a willing ear to my hearty 



54 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

thanks for her great loving kindness to me in 
bestowing her book upon the world. I hailed 
it with delight, and waited for it impatiently, 
and it strengthened and enlightened me, and 
roused me to a higher and holier effort. 
* * * God bless her, and I pray that we 
may soon again be gladdened by the falling 
music of her words. * * * 

"Miss Converse writes me that she was 
made very happy by her visit at Brooklyn 
with you, and I am so glad — for it is dread- 
ful to breathe the air of Mrs. B's stately 
mansion, and I felt myself encrusted with 
paste during the whole sojourn — such mock 
dignity, such airs and graces from the well- 
preserved mistress, and such exquisite con- 
descension made me feel that pride was not 
quite dead, for I could not bear the foot upon 
my neck without wincing. 

"Since my return, I have been interested 
in an Anti-Slavery Fair in Upton, which was 
very successful, and comfortably pleasant; 
though the unusual exertions of such occasions 
are very wearisome. Mr. Quincy was there, 
and I was glad to know him better. * * * 

"My love for Mr. Spring and Eddie, a kiss 
for the sweet little bird, and God love and keep 
you, ever and ever. 

Emma Willard." 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 55 

In 1846 Mr. and Mrs. Spring took Margaret 
Fuller with them to Europe. They travelled 
almost entirely in private carriages, for which 
Mr. Spring paid, so Margaret's expenses were 
small. They hired parlors which she and her 
guests were free to use. It was undoubtedly 
because Margaret was their companion that 
the Springs met many of the people they did, 
but their social success was by no means 
wholly derived from her influence. They be- 
came intimate with William and Mary Howitt,. 
and Mrs. Spring had special enjoyment with 
Harriet Martineau. Long afterward, in 1876, 
an English clergyman, the Rev. Goodwyn 
Barnaby, wrote thus to Moncure Conway: 

"Mrs. Spring was one of the most winning 
women I ever met, and I was in raptures with 
her." Of an evening party given by the 
Springs in London, he says: "I had Mrs. 
Spring and was I not content?" "Fox," 
who had to listen to Miss Fuller, Barnaby 
goes on to say, "was talked to death." He 
would have liked a quiet hand at whist 
better. * * * The Springs invited me to spend 
a couple of years with them at Rhode Island 
( ?), but I never dared to go." 

This unappreciative Fox was the radical 
preacher whom fifteen years later, Moncure 
Conway succeeded in London. Mrs. Spring 
was not unappreciative. She always felt ad- 
miring affection for Margaret Fuller and said 



56 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

of her: "Men fell in love with her wherever 
she went and wanted to marry her." 

The Springs were with Margaret in Rome 
when she met the Marquis Ossoli accidentally 
as related in the biographies. Mrs. Spring 
thus told her part in the story: 

"The first I knew of the acquaintance, I saw 
that a man came every morning and stood in 
the street opposite to our windows and 
Margaret would go out and walk off with him. 
I said, 'Margaret, bring that young man in 
and introduce him; ' so she did." 

Ossoli proposed to Margaret then. "He 
knew all her dresses," said Mrs. Spring, 
describing the nature of his attachment. Mrs. 
Spring thought him an attractive, childlike, 
unambitious young fellow. Margaret was, in 
the beginning, inclined to "make fun" of 
Ossoli's affection, but the day the party went 
away she said, as the carriage rolled along: 

"I believe I am leaving my heart in Rome." 

"Not with that young man?" exclaimed 
Mrs. Spring. 

"Yes," answered Margaret Fuller. 

The Springs returned to America. Margaret 
went back to Rome and married Ossoli. In 
December, 1849, she wrote, in evident refer- 
ence to Mrs. Spring's reception of the news of 
the then two years old, but recently announced 
marriage : 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 57 

"Your letter, My Dear Rebecca, was written 
in your noblest and most womanly spirit." 

The ship in which the Ossolis attempted to 
come to America was quarantined at Gibraltar 
because its captain had died of smallpox. 
This delay in the voyage gave opportunity for 
a fumigated letter from Margaret to reach the 
Springs before the date of the ship's arrival in 
this country. Thus made aware of the coming 
danger, they sent their children away, told 
their servants, so they might go if they chose, 
and themselves prepared to receive into their 
home the visitors who might bring contagion 
and death with them. 

The ship was wrecked on the Jersey coast. 
Margaret's mother hurried to the Springs, 
who lived near the scene of the disaster. 
Thither also came Charles Sumner, whose 
brother had perished with Margaret Ossoli 
and her child. 

Of that time, Mrs. Spring wrote: 
"Margaret's mother sat like a stone in our 
house. She shed no tears, * * it was pitiful. 
I sat down on a low seat before her, and told 
her stories of our life and travels together 
(with Margaret). Suddenly tears came into 
her eyes; she laid her hand on my head and 
said, 'You make me think of my child as 
alive'." 

For years afterwards Mrs. Spring, when at 



58 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

the seaside, habitually dreamed of Margaret 
Fuller. 

Fredrika Bremer, the Swedish novelist, 
became intimate with the Springs during her 
stay in this country. In her book, 'The 
Homes of the New World," she generally 
designates them, "the good Marcus," and 
"charming Rebecca." 

Marcus Spring and William Henry Chan- 
ning were warmly attached to each other, and 
sympathized in the desire to establish a happy 
social order on earth, but Channing did not 
quite believe in the plan, into which the Springs 
went heartily, and heavily as to finances, to 
found a community at Eagleswood, N. J. 

Under the auspices of Mr. and Mrs. Spring 
a community was founded there, whither men 
and women of note flocked as temporary 
visitors or permanent residents. Arnold 
Buffum passed his last years there. So did 
James G. Birney, the first Liberty Party Chief. 
The artists Innes and Page both lived for 
brief periods at Eagleswood. 

The community, as such, did not long exist. 

"But no," said Mrs. Spring, a little patheti- 
cally in her old age. "It was not all a mis- 
take, what we dreamed of with William Henry 
Channing. That is the way people ought to 
live." 

The community having lapsed, and the 
Eagleswood Park become their private prop- 






THEODORE D. WELD 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 59 

erty, Mr. and Mrs. Spring made noble use of 
their opportunity. It was a time of developing 
but largely undeveloped educational thought. 
They established Theodore D. Weld as Prin- 
cipal of a school at Eagleswood. This great 
Abolitionist, who had married "Carolina's 
high-souled daughter," Angelina Grimke, was 
an intellectual pioneer. The Eagleswood 
school was a wonderful institution. Boys and 
girls, colored and white, were equal pupils in 
it, and much fine young life was there stimu- 
lated to the throbbing effort of the years of war 
that were soon to come. 

In this decade Mrs. Spring made at least 
one speech in favor of woman's rights, but she 
was never exactly a public worker in reform. 

In 1859 she was well-known, but more be- 
cause of her friends than herself. Then in a 
single day she resolved to do and did what will 
connect her name for centuries with a great 
historic event. 

Mr. Oswald Villard in his Life of John 
Brown, quotes a few sentences from Mrs. 
Spring which sound as if on this occasion she 
first consulted her husband, but I am inclined 
to believe she really acted independently of 
him. I was told at the time that she did not 
have to consult him because he chanced to be 
from home on that important day. 

She read in the paper that Mrs. Child had 
written to Governor Wise and asked permis- 



60 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

sion to visit John Brown, who had just been 
sentenced to death in Virginia. Mrs. Spring 
said, "If Mrs. Child is going to Harper's 
Ferry, I am." She asked no governors. She 
took her nineteen-year old son Edward and 
started South, within two or three hours of 
the moment in which she had said she would 
go. 

It is hard now to realize that it was a 
greatly heroic thing for a woman and a boy to 
do — simply to go from New Jersey into the 
northern part of Virginia to sympathize with 
a noble old man — but great and heroic it was 
for Rebecca Buffum Spring and her lad to go 
on that errand in the early November of 1859. 

If ever a woman was equipped by nature to 
win permission from foemen, Mrs. Spring 
was that woman, and she won consent from 
the local magnates to enter John Brown's cell. 
Once, before she gained it, she became afraid 
that she had excited animosity that would lead 
to refusal. She knew that she must not arouse 
suspicion that she had come South with in- 
surrectionary purpose, but she sat in the hotel 
at Harper's Ferry and heard people around 
her telling how the men of the town had killed 
the boy Thompson, after he was their helpless 
and wounded prisoner. The incident has 
passed into history as one of the most shame- 
ful in any annals. Mrs. Spring, hearing the 
details within a few days of the occurrence, 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 61 

failed to contain herself. She broke out into 
vehement speech, denouncing the cowardly 
murder. To her amazement as she flamed 
Cassandra-like among them, her listeners be- 
came speechless, and one by one in utter 
silence went out of the room and left her alone. 

When she and her son walked the streets 
they played a little comedy. They were aware 
that people passed or followed them, trying to 
hear what they said to each other. They 
carefully bestowed on such listeners remarks 
like these : "Isn't that a lovely house over there ! 
Do look at it." They were never overheard 
criticizing anything. 

When at last she saw the man who stands 
pre-eminent among human beings in willing- 
ness to die for the most despised and injured 
people on the globe, the woman, who had been 
the comrade of the most cultured persons in 
two continents, found herself surprised. 

"I had expected," she said, "to see a rough 
backwoodsman sort of man. He was courtly 
and magnificent in his bearing." 

Her son made a sketch in the great prisoner's 
cell. She saw John Brown's captured com- 
panions, and her heart was touched with 
especial tenderness for Aaron D. Stephens. 

She found that she could do nothing effectual 
on the spot to relieve the prisoners, and she 
returned North, to receive John Brown's wife 
into her own home. Thomas Wentworth 



62 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

Higginson had gone to North Elba and brought 
Mrs. Brown thence. The plan was for her to 
go to her husband, get private speech with him, 
and try to induce him to consent to co-operate, 
at least passively, in an attempt to rescue him. 
John Brown had already sent a message of 
refusal, because he depreciated any effort to 
save his life that might sacrifice others, and 
also because he had promised his jailer that 
he would not try to escape. 

It was however, thought by his Northern 
friends, that his wife might persuade him to 
change his unselfish resolution. That wife was 
an extremely noble woman. She had been 
a perfect stepmother to his older children. 
She had borne him thirteen of her own. She 
had been his chief est friend. She was sixteen 
years younger than he, and she had been little 
more than a child when he married her. 

So far as can be judged from the recorded 
story, the man, who could calmly wait for the 
hour of his own execution, had not the nerve to 
meet and refuse the entreaty which he expect- 
ed his wife to make. He stopped her by message 
that reached her in Baltimore. He would not 
see her till the day before that appointed for his 
death. Much of his correspondence with her 
passed through Mrs. Spring, to whom he wrote: 
"My dear Friend. * * May the God of my 
fathers bless and reward you a thousandfold." 

That sentence with his name added there- 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 63 

unto should be Rebecca Buffum Spring's 
epitaph. 

To his wife on Nov. 16, the death-conse- 
crated martyr wrote : "My dear Wife: I write 
you in answer to a most kind letter from Mrs. 
Spring. I owe her ten thousand thanks for 
her kindness to you, particularly and more 
especially, than for what she has done and is 
doing in a more direct way for me personally." 

On Nov. 24, he wrote to Mrs. Spring: "I 
am always grateful for anything you do or 
write. You have laid me and my family under 
many and great obligations." 

John Brown was executed on December 
second. Four of his men were hung on De- 
cember sixteenth, but the two remaining ones, 
Stephens and Hazlitt were sentenced to die 
in March, 1860. 

Mrs. Spring corresponded all that winter 
with the two young heroes whom their country 
had decided to dismiss from all earthly service. 
She sent them needed supplies. "Oh," she 
said afterward, when reading aloud one of 
Stephens' grateful letters. "He did not know 
that while we were packing that box, his dearest 
friend stood by it, and said, 'Mrs. Spring, I 
wish forty men were going to him in this box 
and I was one of them!' " 

She wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 
insisting that an attempt should be made to 
rescue Stephens and Hazlitt. She was so 



64 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

urgent that Col. Higginson once told me that 
her influence determined him to make the 
attempt. He has related the story in his 
"Cheerful Yesterdays." He and Montgomery 
of Kansas and others, went into the vicinity 
of Harper's Ferry, planned the method, 
and even got word to the condemned lads 
that such effort would be made, but finally 
Montgomery (probably wisely) decided that 
success was impossible, and the effort was 
abandoned. 

I was still a child when I heard Mrs. Spring 
say: "I went into my parlor, and there stood 
a beautiful girl, who said, 'I am Jennie D. 
They told me to come to you. They said you 
would help me. I want to go to Virginia and 
beg for Aaron Stephens' life.' " 

The girl went. Letcher, afterward a con- 
spicuous Confederate, had then succeeded 
Henry A. Wise to the governorship. She got 
down on her knees to Letcher. "He was 
brutal to her," said Mrs. Spring. 

Stephens' sister and Jennie D — took 
breakfast with the condemned boys on the 
last morning, Stephens was so brignt he even 
made those women smile once. 

"I could walk miles today, if they would 
only let me," said he, who a few days before 
had written to Mrs. Spring that he sometimes 
wished he might bear all the sorrows of the 
whole world, and so save it from suffering. 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 65 

The good-bys were spoken, the men still 
cheerful. The women left them. 

"But afterwards," said Mrs. Spring, "some- 
body went back and looked into the cell — 
and was sorry to have seen the sight. I sup- 
pose it must be awful for two strong young 
fellows to know they are to die in an hour." 

Who was it that went back? Was it the 
sister — was it the heroic maiden ? I know 
only that there were tears in Mrs. Spring's 
voice as she told me the story. 

The bereaved women came North to Eagles- 
wood. The Springs had made arrangements. 
The funeral services for Stephens and Hazlitt 
were held in their house. The bodies were 
buried in their ground. 

Southerners withdrew their trade from Mr. 
Spring's firm. His partners were inclined to 
complain at having to suffer with him for what 
he and his wife had done. When told of the 
loss and disturbance, she merely said: "I 
don't care a copper." 

About this time she became a grandmother, 
and a fond one, but she gaily declined to be 
called "grandmother." Her daughter's name 
for her was always "the Madre," and now the 
madre wore her gray hair in lovely puffs above 
her brow, and no longer liked to tell her age. 
But she continued to relate her John Brown 
experiences. She said: "It makes my head 
hot and my feet cold to talk of John Brown." 



66 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

Mr. Spring died in 1874 — "a good man/' 
as Dr. Bellows called him. The widow of 
Marcus Spring wore a white muslin gown at 
his funeral, and I never saw a more really 
beautiful face and figure than hers as, thus 
robed in white, she stood by his open grave. 
In after years she always called a California 
white rose the "Marcus rose.'* 

She was over 70 when she went to California, 
whence she never came back to us who loved 
her in the East. 

The Los Angeles Woman's Club celebrated 
Mrs. Spring's 93d birthday, and she played 
the part of a queen in a little farce written by 
her daughter, and enacted on that occasion. 
Her great-grandson, Loring Mackaye, had a 
part in the play with her. 

Her daughter, Mrs. Peet wrote: "There was 
a pillow fight between the Queen and her page 
before the throne, and anything more spirited 
than the madre no one ever saw." 

Mrs. Spring was taken ill on Christmas day, 
1910, and sank steadily after that, but she said, 
"I am not sick, I am awfully old," then indicat- 
ing herself, she added in her quaintest, prettiest 
way, "Jack's alive and is going to stay alive." 

She lay awake till twelve o'clock one night 
and recited poetry. It is not probable that she 
suffered much, but she had always borne pain 
so stoically that her watchers could not always 
tell whether or not she was in bodily distress. 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 67 

Once she moaned for several hours, and being 
asked if she were suffering, she answered with 
a touch of sweet wilfulness in her manner: 
"No, that's my way of singing myself to sleep." 
She was exactly 99 years and 8 months old, 
when silence came to her clear voice. 



THREE OF ARNOLD BUFFUM'S 
GREAT-GRANDSONS 



PARKER PILLSBURY AND THE 
FOSTERS 

It was my good fortune in early girlhood to 
spend a few summer weeks on a farm in Wor- 
cester County, Massachusetts, my hosts were 
the abolitionists, Stephen S. and Abby Kelley 
Foster. They were a thoroughly united pair, 
completely one in affection and purpose, but 
it is doubtful if it ever occurred to any one who 
knew them to speak or think of the wife as 
Mrs. Stephen Foster. They had come to love 
each other in consequence of association in a 
struggle of grim incident and grand signifi- 
cance, — a struggle which had led them to 
underestimate the value of many social con- 
ventions. 

He was one of those unique characters who 
come to the front in periods of storm and stress. 
In an anti-slavery or woman's rights meeting, 
he might have been most fitly described by the 
fines which Lowell wrote about Theodore 
Parker : 

"Every word that he speaks has been fierily 

furnaced 
In the blast of a life that has struggled in 

earnest." 

69 



70 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

He was logical to the point of unreason. 
Mary Grew, one of the Philadelphia abolition- 
ists, in later years said of him, smiling the while 
at some recollection, "Logic was the death of 
Stephen!" His style of argument was as fol- 
lows: "slavery is the sum of villanies, such as 
theft, murder, and rapine, the Southern 
church supports slavery, hence Southern clergy- 
men are guilty of all villanies; Northern clergy- 
men extend the right hand of fellowship to 
Southern clergymen, thus they condone and 
partake of their guilt/ ' From such general 
premises he would proceed with unfaltering 
energy to the close personal conclusion, that 
the Rev. Z, a Northern gentleman of the most 
amiable character conceivable, was guilty, be- 
fore God, of theft, murder, and rapine. An 
argument of this sort was presented one Sun- 
day afternoon to Theo. Brown, Harry Blake, 
and John C. Wyman of Worcester, to their 
utter discomfort and bewilderment. Blake, 
who loved the Rev. Mr. X., was a Trans- 
cendentalist of that New England type of 
character which is helpless in the clutches of 
its conscience and can be frightened into the 
conviction that anything is sinful by the mere 
suggestion that it may be. "Foster has proved 
it," lamented Blake to his lighter minded com- 
panions as they all walked away after the argu- 
ment, "Foster has proved that X is a murderer 
and a thief, — and yet he isn't!" 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 71 

Mr. Foster was, as nearly as it is possible 
for a man to be, free from unkind personal 
feeling. His attitude towards opponents was 
always such as once impelled him to say in a 
public meeting, "I love my friend Higginson, 
but I loathe his opinions." In his home life, as 
I knew him, this doughty warrior upon evil 
was the most lovable of men, gently lenient 
to girlish impertinence, and sympathetically 
disposed to the spirit of youth. 

He was a sturdy farmer of his New England 
fields. "I should hate farming in the West," 
he once said. "I should hate to put my spade 
into ground where it did not hit against a 
rock." His features were as rugged as the 
rocks he loved, and his hands were hard and 
gnarled with toil. His gestures were ungainly, 
but his voice was beautiful. His eyes were 
blue and kind, but sometimes there was a look 
in them as of a man bent indeed on going his 
appointed way in this world, but who did not 
always see a light upon that way. 

There was more effect in Foster than in his 
wife of what may be called richness of nature. 
She was a person in whom heart, intellect, 
and conscience were undisturbed by temper- 
ament, which in his case was an atmosphere 
which trailed its own mists and colors across 
the true image of his character. The study 
of Stephen Foster's life during the years be- 
fore he married Abby Kelley, discloses one of 



72 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

those obscure portions of history, the knowl- 
edge of which is necessary to a perfect com- 
prehension of the action that nations take in 
critical hours. The seed that he sowed in 
many a New England valley, and scattered 
over the plains of Ohio, ripened red and rich 
on Southern battlefields. 

Stephen Symonds Foster was the ninth in a 
family of thirteen children and was born in 
Canterbury, New Hampshire, in November, 
1809. His father, Colonel Asa Foster, had 
been a Revolutionary soldier. His mother 
was a beautiful and gracious woman, and she 
and her husband both lived to be nearly a 
hundred years old. The home was a farm of 
several hundred acres, situated on a hillside 
overlooking the Merrimac. Stephen, predes- 
tined by every faculty of his being to do a 
reformer's work in the world, began his service 
on earth as a carpenter and builder. At 
twenty-two he entered upon a course of col- 
legiate study to prepare himself for the min- 
istry of the Orthodox Congregational Church. 
The son of a soldier, he had already adopted 
the principle of non-resistance, and when he 
was called on while in Dartmouth College to 
perform military duty, he resisted, was arrested 
and put into jail in Haverhill. He found the 
jail in a terribly unsanitary condition. Men 
were there imprisoned for debt as well as for 
crime. Stephen moved among these wretched 




m 




AISBY KELLEY FOSTER 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 73 

creatures like a pitying angel, receiving their 
confidences and observing their condition, 
after which he published an indignant letter 
calling attention to the state of affairs. This 
protest excited so much interest that an effort 
was made to clean the prison, when the filth 
on the floors was found to be so deep and hard 
that men were obliged to dig it up with pick- 
axes. The reform in this jail led to investi- 
gation and an effective movement to improve 
the whole prison system of New Hampshire, 
as a consequence of which imprisonment for 
debt was soon abolished. 

His college studies finished, Stephen entered, 
for a theological course, the Union Seminary 
in New York. 

In 1834 Foster made the acquaintance of 
Parker Pillsbury, a dark-eyed, broad-should- 
ered youth, also a teacher, hoping and working 
to become a minister. Foster gave him lessons 
in ethics which made of him an abolitionist, 
and the hearts of the two men dave at once to 
each other. Pillsbury had the temperament 
of a Hebrew prophet, and when he spoke 
against the institution which his soul abhorred, 
it was in the language of Jeremiah, and with 
a ' voice whose rich melancholy tones could 
never be forgotten by the ears that heard them. 

It was not until 1839 that Foster entirely 
relinquished his purpose to become a minister. 
By that time his experience in anti-slavery 



74 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

work had shown the utter impossibility 
of any such service for him. For some years 
he pursued the ordinary life of the peregrinat- 
ing anti-slavery apostle of his day, going from 
town to town, almost begging people to come 
to hear his message. In few places could he 
get an adequate hearing. The church digni- 
taries forbade him the use of their meeting- 
houses, and if he obtained places in which to 
speak, they forbade the people to go to hear 
his gospel. The town of Stratham furnished 
a couple of amusing incidents to the history of 
this tragi-comic warfare between a reformer 
and the nation which he sought to reform. 
Once he and Pillsbury found there a meeting- 
house opened and warmed for them at the 
hour for which they had requested it, but not 
a soul came to sit on its benches and listen to 
their words. Foster made a second visit in 
the next springtime to the town, and a dozen 
persons gathered in the hall, and he began his 
address. Suddenly, when he was in the middle 
of a sentence, every one of his hearers arose, 
probably at some prearranged signal, and 
walked solemnly and quietly out of the room, 
leaving him with mouth open, and arms in the 
air, his gesture half made, and his spirit per- 
haps more disconcerted than at any other 
moment of his life. 

In the summer of 1841, a three-days' con- 
vention was held on Nantucket Island, and 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 15 

there Frederick Douglass, then a young and 
unknown fugitive slave, made a great speech, 
which was a revelation alike to the abolition- 
ists and to himself of his capacities. Parker 
Pillsbury came away from this convention 
much excited but also much dissatisfied with 
all past achievements. He wrote to Foster: 
"After all, I must come to New Hampshire, 
brother Stephen. The rocks must echo there 
the coming era, and the adjacent hills must 
reply, as we proclaim through the state the 
doctrines and demands of universal brother- 
hood of man. We must show ourselves what 
we are already called, 'dangerous men.' De- 
vise some plan, if you can, by which we may 
improve on the operations of the past. If we 
scourged the pro-slavery church and clergy 
last year with whips, let us this year chastise 
them with scorpions! To the popular pre- 
vailing denomination we are infidels indeed, 
and we mean to be and are willing to be 
scandalized as such." 

A month after this letter was written, Foster 
answered its appeal to inaugurate new 
methods. On the seventeenth of September, 
1841, he went in to the old North Church, the 
first Congregational church in Concord, New 
Hampshire, and just as the minister was about 
to begin his sermon, he stood up and in a 
solemn and dignified manner claimed the 
right in his character as a man and a Christian, 



76 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

to be heard in behalf of the people who were 
enslaved in this country. He was seized by 
two keepers of the state prison who were 
present and was dragged out of the church. 

Stephen Foster's daughter said once of her 
parents, "My mother found it hard to like 
people with whom she differed, but my father 
loved everybody." As a speaker, Foster was 
forcible and witty, and ever ready in retort. 
One of the stories told of him is that on one 
occasion a slaveholder, availing himself of the 
freedom of speech always granted on the anti- 
slavery platform, ventured upon it to argue in 
behalf of the "peculiar institution." Foster 
contradicted some assertion made by this man, 
who, in return, asked indignantly, "Do you 
think I would lie ?" "Well," returned Stephen 
in his rich kindly voice, "I don't know as you 
would lie, but I do know that you will steal." 

During the years of the early forties, 
Foster and Parker Pillsbury travelled much 
together on their apostolic errands. They 
collected money for their "cause," but let their 
own needs wait. After a meeting in Pem- 
broke, N. H., the two comrades secured one 
bed, and also lodging and care for the horse 
with which they were driving across the 
country from meeting to meeting, but they 
went supperless to their own slumbers. The 
next morning they spent four cents for baker's 
biscuits, and four more for raisins, and sitting 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 77 

down by the stove in the store where they had 
made their purchases they broke their long 
fast. This trip lasted eight days, and when 
they returned to Concord, N. H., which was 
Pillsbury's home, they found that although 
they had induced a goodly number of people 
to subscribe five dollars each towards liquidat- 
ing an anti-slavery publishing debt, they had 
left as salary for their labors just thirty-seven 
cents. Pillsbury, who had a delicate wife, 
tells the story in his "Acts of the Anti-Slavery 
Apostles," and admits that he did not smile, 
though Foster may have done so, when the 
latter commented genially on the situation, by 
saying, "Well, Parker, I have no wife and you 
have; so this time we will not divide." Pills- 
bury went home to find his wife without money, 
and so nearly destitute of food that he broke 
a resolution which he had formed never to be 
in debt, and contracted a grocery bill for three 
dollars, the money to pay which came in some 
almost miraculous manner before night. 

A typical experience occurred to Foster in 
May, 1842. He tried to obtain the loan of 
a place in Amherst in which to speak. The 
meeting-houses were all refused, and appar- 
ently for no reason except aversion to his sub- 
ject, save in the case of the Universalist Church 
which was engaged for another purpose at the 
desired time. Foster then asked the Baptist 
and the two Congregational ministers of the 



78 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

town to permit him to address their congrega- 
tions at the regular meetings on the next day, 
which was Sunday. They all refused, but on 
Saturday evening he attended a meeting in the 
vestry of one of the Congregational churches, 
and spoke for twenty minutes to the audience 
there assembled, and received respectful atten- 
tion. The next forenoon he reflected calmly 
upon the situation, offered "fervent prayer for 
divine guidance/' and then wended his way to 
the Baptist Church. The minister, who was 
about to begin his sermon when Foster arose, 
took the alarm, and called out to him to be 
silent, as he wished to go on with the regular 
services. Foster gave no heed to this but pro- 
ceeded to speak, whereupon a deacon sprang 
at him from behind, and as Foster would not 
forcibly resist force, succeeded in speedily 
dragging him off the platform, which he had 
mounted, and three or four other men lending 
their assistance, carried the interloper into the 
street. Once out in the open air, Foster asked 
the deacon if he was his prisoner, and was told 
that he was not. Being then released, the un- 
daunted abolitionist turned immediately to go 
back into the church, whereupon the deacon 
and his associates caught him again and this 
time held on to him. A messenger was dis- 
patched for the constable who was found at- 
tending service in the Universalist Church. 
This village dignitary came hastily to the scene, 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 79 

and, aided by the deacon, dragged Foster along 
the road, holding him by the arms and collar. 
They thus conveyed him some fifteen rods, to 
a tavern, where they tumbled him on to the 
bar-room floor. Foster, on occasions like this, 
would never help his captors by voluntary 
locomotion, and so it chanced that, a little 
later, he was carried up two flights of stairs, 
and thrown into a small room, where he was 
left in charge of two keepers. 

"Having secured me," he says, "in this 
temporary prison, the deacon returned to his 
meeting, to tender to the church the emblems 
of the body and blood of the Prince of Peace. 
During the evening one of my keepers left. 
The other remained through the night, and 
slept with his clothes on, the door locked and 
the lamp burning. Indeed, I was as strictly 
guarded as though I had been a felon, waiting 
only an opportunity to escape. At ten o'clock 
on Monday morning I was put on trial before 
Israel Hunt. The complaint set forth that I 
had entered the Baptist meeting-house 'with 
force and arms,' and disturbed the meeting by 
making a noise, by rude and indecent behavior, 
etc., etc. Mr. Pratt testified that I treated 
him ungentlemanly. On being asked what I 
said or did that was ungentlemanly, he could 
not recollect, he said, then, but he was certain, 
very, that I treated him 'ungentlemanly.' As 
I do not acknowledge allegiance to any human 



80 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

power, I made no defence. I asked the wit- 
nesses some questions, and said a few words, 
but they were designed to influence the audi- 
ence present, rather than the decision of Mr. 
Hunt. In that I felt no interest. Mr. Hunt's 
sentence was that I pay a fine of three dollars 
and costs of prosecution; intimating that a 
repetition of the offence would be followed by 
a much heavier penalty. I assured him I had 
done my duty in attempting to preach the 
gospel to the Baptists, and it was contrary to 
my sense of propriety to pay a fine for it. Mr. 
Hunt then ordered me to be imprisoned in 
Amherst jail till the fine was paid. At ten 
o'clock the next day this order was carried into 
effect, by my incarceration in this loathsome 
prison, where duty to God and my countrymen 
requires me to remain at present. Relief is 
kindly offered me from various sources, when- 
ever I shall think proper to accept it. But I 
feel that the object is not yet accomplished that 
my heavenly Father had in view in sending me 
to this dismal abode. And till that is done, I 
have no wish to be relieved. To one as rest- 
less as I am, imprisonment is oppressive. I 
can now surely 'remember them that are in 
bonds, as bound with them.' " 

It was not at all certain to these itinerant 
apostles of freedom that death at the hands of 
the mob might not be their final portion. 
Pillsbury admits that he always dreaded an 





^^^ww 






AMERICAN CHIVALRY 81 

encounter with mob violence, though his 
courage invariably rose to meet it when the 
hour of its fury had fairly set in, but he never 
discerned in Foster any signs of agitation, 
either while the tempest of human wrath was 
gathering or after it had burst over their heads. 
Yet, in a letter Foster speaks as though he had 
dreaded to enter upon the path he was pursu- 
ing, not indeed from fear of bodily injury, but 
because he shrank from the contumely and 
mockery to which he must expose himself. 
"I was a slave," he says, "I am a slave no 
longer. My lips have been sealed by man. 
They will never again be sealed till sealed in 
death. My body is freely yielded to the perse- 
cutors to torture at pleasure. But my spirit 
must and shall be free." 

One Sunday Foster attempted to speak dur- 
ing the forenoon meeting in the South Church 
of Concord, New Hampshire, and having been 
summarily ejected from the building, he went 
again in the afternoon, and began his harangue 
the moment he entered the body of the house. 
He was dragged out by some young men, who 
did not wait even to receive orders from the 
pulpit. The fellows handled their victim so 
roughly that he was hurt to such an extent 
that his companion, Pillsbury, was alarmed 
and had to venture into the church again to 
summon the doctor forth from the sanctuary. 
Foster was then taken to the home of a sym- 



82 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

pathizing friend, and there he remained till 
the next afternoon, when the sheriff came to 
arrest him. Pillsbury and other friends, hav- 
ing heard of the proposed arrest, proceeded to 
the house to behold a scene as in a comedy, 
but it was a comedy with a significance which 
had to do with grave issues in the history of 
reform. Foster was found to be still very 
lame as an effect of the yesterday's encounters, 
and he was seated in an easy chair. The 
sheriff did not wholly relish the job he had in 
hand, and was as polite as possible. "Mr. 
Foster," he said, * I have authority here to 
take you before Judge Badger, to answer to a 
charge of disturbing public worship." Foster 
replied blandly, "I do not know of any business 
between me and my friend Badger requiring 
my attendance today, and must decline to 
answer your call." 

The sheriff insisted, but very kindly, and 
undoubtedly with much misgiving as to the 
outcome of the interview with this terrible 
non-resistant antagonist. Foster would not, 
and indeed could not, easily stir to accompany 
the officer of the law, so at last that worthy 
requested some of Foster's anti-slavery friends 
who were in the room to help carry his desired 
prisoner out to the carriage. The abolitionists 
refused to give their aid, but Foster himself 
good-naturedly suggested that the minister 
and the young heroes of the preceding day 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 83 

would be the proper helpers on this occasion. 
Meanwhile the townsfolk gathered in excited 
groups about the house. Public sympathy ap- 
pears to have been with Foster, for the sheriff 
had difficulty in persuading any man to come 
to his aid. Finally, one member of the church 
and a working man not of the church came in 
with the officer, and taking Foster gently in 
their hands and arms, bore him bareheaded to 
the door and placed him on the carriage seat. 
The sheriff said that it was "a very unpleasant 
duty to perform." which we well understood. 
A crowd followed the prisoner to the 
judgment hall. It was on the second story, 
and the stairway being narrow, it was truly a 
ludicrous operation for the officer and his 
posse to climb it with so unseemly a burden. 
Foster said afterwards that he felt rather seri- 
ous than otherwise, till ascending the stairs, 
feet foremost, high above his head, and yet 
handled with the utmost caution, he could not 
help laughing outright, and did not recover 
his gravity again through the whole farcical 
trial. 

The trial had the characteristic peculiarity 
which the prisoner was apt to impart to such 
occasions in his experience. He disconcerted 
one witness who testified that Foster had vio- 
lated the regulations of the church, by asking 
whether it would be contrary to those regula- 
tions to come into the church and give the 



84 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

alarm if the child of the witness were being 
kidnapped. When the bothered man had 
been forced to admit that he did not think 
that would be an unjustifiable interruption of 
the services, Foster drew his prompt conclu- 
sion, and asked if it would be violating the 
regulations of the South Church to give alarm 
when two millions and a half of the witness's 
countrymen were being kidnapped. The 
audience listened with delight to Foster, and 
the poor witness cried in despair, "These ques- 
tions are asked for sport." 

Pillsbury claims that there was no existing 
law against which Foster had really offended, 
but the judge was determined to convict, and 
he sentenced the prisoner to pay a fine of five 
dollars and costs. Immediately the men in 
court, who were listening, threw the necessary 
money on the table. These contributors were 
not professed abolitionists, and their action 
convinced the judge that the people of Concord 
were not with him in his decision, so he made a 
hasty moral retreat, and remitted the fine. 
Foster had, of course, protested against the 
recognition of the sentence implied by the pay- 
ment of the fine, but his friends had not heeded 
him, and now that the court refused the money, 
they handed it to him, and he accepted it as a 
contribution to the anti-slavery cause. 

The people of Lynn, Massachusetts, passed 
a very exciting Sunday during the year of 1842. 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 85 

On the Saturday evening, Parker Pillsbury, 
Nathaniel P. Rogers, Stephen Foster, and 
Thomas Parnell Beach all found themselves 
in the town, and immediately began to lay 
plans for vigorous work to be done on the 
morrow. Foster went to Mr. Cook, the Con- 
gregational minister, and requested to be al- 
lowed to preach for him at some one of the 
Sunday services. Mr. Cook refused, and then 
the abolitionist asked if the use of the church 
might be granted for an anti-slavery meeting 
at any hour when it was not needed for ordi- 
nary purposes. Mr. Cook refused this request 
also, and added gratuitously the threat that if 
Foster ever came into the house to speak with- 
out invitation, he should be "taken care of." 
Mr. Foster replied with unruffled serenity that 
it was uncertain where he should speak the 
next day, but probably somewhere in Lynn. 
Meanwhile, Pillsbury and Beach visited Over- 
seer Nathan Breed of the Friends' Society, and 
asked of him permission to occupy the Friends' 
meeting-house during a part of Sunday. When 
this request was refused, the two agitators told 
Breed that he must not be surprised if they 
spoke in the regular meeting. This would be 
a proceeding presumably in complete harmony 
with the principles and practices of Friends, 
and Breed answered to the suggestion, "You 
will find us a peaceable people." 

The next day, June twenty-fifth, was a 



86 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

lovely day, and the abolitionists sallied forth 
in the perfect weather, to bear their testimony 
upon practical righteousness. Foster, Pills- 
bury, and Rogers repaired to Mr. Cook's 
church, and as soon as the long prayer was 
finished, Foster, who had been standing with 
the rest of the congregation, instead of sitting 
down, began at once to speak. His manner 
was solemn and his voice low and serious. 
"Sit down," cried the indignant minister; and 
"Sit down, sir," he cried again; and as the 
deep warning voice went on, the minister 
thundered out, "I command you in the name 
of the Commonwealth to sit down." At this 
word the sexton and two other men seized 
Foster, and the application of force to his pas- 
sive body and non-resistant soul resulted, this 
time, in his being carried out from the church, 
face downward, two men bearing his shoulders 
between them, while one comically short man 
held on to his ankles, as if they were the handles 
to a wheelbarrow. Outside the edifice they 
released him. He rose to his feet, looked at 
his captors, and remarked pleasantly, "This, 
then, is your Christianity, is it ?" He further 
improved the opportunity by speaking to a 
number of the audience who had followed the 
ridiculous procession in which he had been the 
principal figure, till the sexton interrupted, 
ordering the people to go back into the church : 
"No breaking in upon worship, friend sexton," 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 87 

said Rogers. "Don't drive folks in, if you do 
drag them out." This remark broke the ten- 
sion of the moment, and sexton and abolition- 
ists, all Yankees alike, joined in a good- 
humored burst of laughter. 

After a few minutes more of anti-slavery ex- 
hortation, the undismayed Foster walked 
across the common and entered the Baptist 
meeting-house, not many rods distant from 
the church whence he had just been expelled. 
Here he sat down and waited quietly till the 
services were through, then arose and began to 
speak as the audience was moving towards 
the door. Instantly he was pounced upon and 
hurried along the aisle, out of the door and 
down the steps with such violence that his 
clothing was torn and he was somewhat hurt. 
He rose from the ground on to which he had 
been hurled, addressed some gentle words to 
the multitude, and walked away to the house 
of William Bassett, an anti-slavery Quaker. 
Rogers remained, meditating upon the scene, 
ana some young Baptists began to rail at him, 
telling him that he and his fellow reformers 
ought to be tarred and feathered and cow- 
hided. "Ah," said Rogers, "Does your gospel 
run like that, my friends ?" 

At noon the abolitionists issued notices that 
they would hold a meeting that afternoon at 
six o'clock, in Lyceum Hall, which they had 
secured. Rogers, Beach, and Foster then at- 



88 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

tended an afternoon meeting of the Friends' 
Society. Beach was a young man who had 
given up the Congregational ministry to work 
for the slave. He broke the silence of the 
Quaker gathering, bearing a testimony against 
the indifference of Friends towards the evils of 
slavery, war, and intemperance, till a Friend 
rose from one of the high seats and said, "Thy 
speaking is an interruption of our worship." 
This was a rebuke, delivered according to the 
manner sanctioned among Friends, when it 
was deemed necessary to check unwelcome or 
ill-considered speech in their meetings. Beach 
made answer that he had supposed speech to 
be free in Friends' meetings, and proceeded 
with his remarks. Another voice from the 
high seats requested his silence, and finally, 
a third elder got on his feet and asked to be 
heard. Beach answered him in phraseology 
akin to that used by his hearers, saying, "If 
anything is revealed to thee, I will hold my 
peace." But all that the elder had to say was 
again to request the abolitionist not to disturb 
the meeting by further speech, and Beach went 
on with his exhortation and criticism. The 
elders, now in despair, gave the signal for clos- 
ing the meeting. As the drab-garmented folk 
began to pass down the aisles, William Bassett 
called, entreating them to stay and hear the 
truth. His mother rushed forward at this, 
and with every sign of great distress, begged 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 89 

her son not to take the part of the abolitionists. 
"Mother," said young Bassett, tenderly but 
firmly, "I am about my Heavenly Father's 
business and cannot hear thee now." Most 
of the older men left the house, but the women 
and the young men lingered to hear Bassett, 
and when he had finished, Foster began to 
speak with unusual fervor, having been much 
moved by the scene between Bassett and his 
mother. The older men now made a rush 
back into the house, seized Foster and hurried 
him towards the door. The young men, how- 
ever, interfered energetically, and secured for 
him at last a full and free opportunity to speak 
in a religious house in Lynn. 

When they all finally left the Quaker meet- 
ing house, Beach took a notice of the pro- 
posed anti-slavery meeting in Lyceum 
Hall to the First Methodist Church, from 
which he was speedily cast out with a dislo- 
cated thumb. Foster went with a similar 
notice to the Baptist Church, whence he had 
been dragged only a few hours previously. 
Both men intended to wait till the services 
were through before reading their notices, but 
Foster, too, was grabbed and carried out as 
soon as he was seen in the church. The 
Quakers had torn off part of his coat collar in 
their assault upon him, and the Baptists now 
tore one of his sleeve cuffs. More than that, 
they actually shut him up for fifteen or twenty 



90 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

minutes in a dark closet under the staircase, a 
place where the sexton kept the lamps, oil cans, 
and similar utensils belonging to the estab- 
lishment. 

In the final years of the anti-slavery conflict 
conditions had somewhat changed, and Mr. 
Foster did not consider it necessary to go un- 
invited into churches, there to interrupt the 
services with his appeals and denunciations, 
but at times, when he felt with especial pain 
the moral indifference of the nation, he would 
think of that old method of his, and tell his 
friends that he was not sure but that he should 
again hear the inner voice, commanding him 
to resume his former habit and startle the 
American people into listening to the truths 
which he had to utter. His life was always 
"strenuous," and it was in the thick of his con- 
test with the churches that he wrote a notable 
letter to Rogers, dated at Canterbury, New 
Hampshire, January 15, 1842. 

"I am now laid on the shelf for the pres- 
ent, perhaps for the winter. Possibly even 
for a longer period. Indeed, when I dare look 
on my shattered form, I sometimes think 
prisons will be needed for me but little longer. 
Within the last fifteen months four times have 
they opened their dismal cells for my reception. 
Twenty-four times have my countrymen 
dragged me from their temples of worship, and 
twice have they thrown me with great violence 



% J7 







LUCY STONE 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 91 

from the second story of their buildings, care- 
less of consequences. Once in a Baptist meet- 
ing house they gave me an evangelical kick in 
the side, which left me for weeks an invalid. 
Times out of memory have they broken up 
my meetings with violence, and hunted me 
with brickbats and bad eggs. Once they in- 
dicted me for assault and battery. Once, in 
the name of outraged law and justice, have they 
attempted to put me in irons. Twice have 
they punished me with fine for preaching the 
gospel; and once in a mob of two thousand 
people have they deliberately attempted to 
murder me, and were only foiled in their de- 
signs after inflicting some twenty blows on my 
head, face, and neck, by the heroism of a brave 
and noble woman. To name her in this be- 
sotted age would be to cast pearls before swine; 
but her name shall be known in other worlds. 
Still, I will not complain, though death should 
be found close on my track. My lot is easy 
compared with that of those for whom 
I labor. I can endure the prison, but save me 
from the plantation. " 

Mobs accompanied the abolitionists to the 
end. Lucy Stone came later than many into 
the field of labor, but Parker Pillsbury once 
saw her hit on the head by a large prayer book 
hurled across the hall, and she gives an ac- 
count of Foster's facing with her a furious mob 
on Cape Cod. It was not till twenty years 



92 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

after the above letter was written that slavery 
was abolished. Those years in the life of 
Stephen Foster can best oe studied in his con- 
nection of love and labor with the woman 
whom he married. No permanent record has 
been made of much of the work done by this 
husband and wife. They travelled and toiled 
in obscure districts, and only occasionally do 
their struggling figures come clearly into the 
view of the student of the times, but always 
when thus glimpsed they are seen to be indeed 
strange, almost grotesque, but Hebraically 
impressive and worthy of utmost reverence. 

Washington, D. C, Feb. 21, 1899. 
My Dear Mrs. Wyman: — 

"I knew Stephen Foster and his wife 
very well. I remember meeting her at the 
church the Sunday before I took my departure 
for Washington to take my seat in the House 
of Representatives at the beginning of my 
public life, and her sincere benediction, as she 
took my hand; T wish you all holy success/ 
She was absolutely veracious and sincere, with 
the spirit of a Hebrew prophetess. 
Faithfully yours, 

George F. Hoar" 



SOJOURNER TRUTH 

Sojourner Truth was the name assumed late 
in life by one Isabella, a negro woman, born a 
slave in New York State. Her mother's par- 
ents were brought from Africa. Her father 
was the child of a negro and a Mohawk Indian 
woman. The date of Isabella's birth is not 
known. There is evidence to show that she 
was emancipated in 1817 under a law which 
freed all slaves in New York who had attained 
the age of forty years; but this evidence is not 
conclusive, and it is possible that she was not 
then forty, and did not receive her liberty until 
1827. 

Isabella's first owners were Dutch people 
named Ardenburgh; and Low Dutch was the 
language in which her mother, Mau-mau Bett, 
told her, when she was a child, that there was 
a God in the sky, and bade her kneel and pray 
to Him after she had been beaten. She also 
taught her to obey her master and not to lie 
nor steal. Poor Mau-mau Bett had had many 
children sold away from her, and she used 
often to groan aloud; but if anyone asked her 
what was the matter, she would answer only, 
"Oh, a good deal ails me!" She would point 
at night to the stars and moon and tell Isabella 



94 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

that her lost children, wherever they were in 
the world, could also look up and see those 
lights in the sky. In spite, however, of the 
yearning tenderness with which the mother 
mourned for these sons and daughters who 
had been torn from her, the family was so little 
removed from the savage condition that 
Isabella, in after years, did not know how 
many children her mother had borne and 
yielded to the slave market. 

Isabella's recollections of slavery in New 
York do not testify to much humanity on the 
part of the masters in that state, and the rude- 
ness of the climate added its peculiar hard- 
ship to the lot of the slave. When a child, she 
had to sleep in a cellar where men and women 
were huddled together in one room. They 
had a little straw to rest on, but between the 
loose boards of the floor they could see the mud 
and water on the ground beneath. Her feet 
were badly frozen. She was often whipped. 
One Sunday morning she was beaten with 
rods bound together by cords, and the scars 
produced by this punishment remained on her 
flesh to the end of her long life. 

As the years passed, she was sold several 
times. For some of her owners she did house- 
work, but for one she hoed corn and carried 
fish, did errands and brought roots and herbs 
from the woods to make beer. 

Womanhood brought its natural experi- 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 95 

ences. She fell in love with a boy named 
Robert, whose master forbade their union. 
The lad came surreptitiously to see her, and 
his master accompanied by his son, followed 
him. The white men seized the negro, beat 
him with heavy canes, and drove him home at 
the end of a rope, the blood streaming from 
his wounds, and with this sight the girlish 
dream of love and joy faded for Isabella. 

During this period of her life, she had a 
sort of religion. She looked upon her master 
as a god, and thought he knew everything that 
she did, even when he was not present. Some- 
times she confessed her errors to him, because 
she believed that he already knew them and 
would be more likely to pardon her if she per- 
formed the ceremony of confession. She 
thought he had a right to hold her as a slave; 
but this belief seems to have worn away in 
time, for, having had her freedom promised 
her a year before the date at which it legally 
must be bestowed upon her, she ran away 
when she found that her owner did not intend 
to fulfil his promise. 

She believed in God and in His power to see 
her; but she had no idea that He could read 
her thoughts, and supposed it necessary to 
speak aloud when she prayed to Him. Her 
prayers were very familiar talks with God; 
and if she was whipped, she thought it would 
not have happened had she known beforehand 



96 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

what her master intended, and had the chance 
to ask God audibly to save her from the 
chastisement. She would begin her prayers 
by saying in Low Dutch, "Our Father in 
heaven," and then go on telling Him all her 
troubles and inquiring as she related her 
grievances: "Do you think that's right, God ?" 
Sometimes her petitions to God were peril- 
ously like commands. She felt that God was 
under much more obligation to her than she 
was to Him. She thought He ought to do her 
bidding, and she endeavored to bribe Him by 
promising to be very good if He would. She 
looked upon goodness as a remunerative ser- 
vice to God, not as a thing beneficial to herself 
or her fellow creatures. 

She married a man named Thomas, and 
became the mother of five children. One of 
her sons, a little boy named Peter, was sold to 
a Mr. Fowler, who took him to Alabama. 
This was an illegal transaction, as the law for- 
bade the sale of any slave out of New York 
State. The mother of Fowler's wife was a 
Mrs. Gedney, who lived in New York; and 
after Isabella herself became free, she went to 
her and indignantly complained of the loss of 
her boy. Mrs. Gedney laughed inhumanly 
at the distress of the negro mother, and saia 
that Isabella had no more reason to grieve 
than she had, for her daughter had also gone 
to Alabama with Fowler. 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 97 

"Yes," answered Isabella, "your child has 
gone there, but she is married, and my boy has 
gone as a slave, and he is too little to go so far 
from his mother." 

Mrs. Gedney, unmoved by this plea, con- 
tinued to scream with laughter; so Isabella 
left her and began to tell her story to the people 
she met, till the matter was actually brought 
before the courts, and Fowler was forced to 
return the little Peter. The judge gave him 
at once into his mother's custody, releasing 
him forever from slavery. His whole body was 
covered with ridges in the flesh and with scars. 
He told Isabella that the blood ran, and that 
when at last he got away from his tormentor, 
he would creep under the stoop of the house in 
Alabama, and there hide himself, a tiny black 
morsel of human misery. 

After this recital, the mother cried: "O 
Lord, render unto them double." But when 
a little later, word came that Fowler had killed 
his wife, the daughter of the woman who had 
been so merry over another's anguish, Isa- 
bella's heart softened, and she said: "O, 
Lord, I didn't mean all that. You took me up 
too quick." 

Isabella had a peculiar religious experience 
about the time she became free. She thought 
she met God face to face one day, and she said 
to Him: "O God, I didn't know as you was 
so big." The consciousness of God's presence 



98 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

became like fire around her, and she was 
afraid, till she began to feel that somebody 
stood between her and this burning terror; and 
after a while she knew that this somebody 
loved her. At first, she thought it must be 
Cato, a preacher whom she knew, or Deencia 
or Sally, people who had been her friends. 
We are not told whether these persons were 
then living or dead, or whether she thought 
they had come in flesh or in the spirit to her 
relief. However this may be, she soon per- 
ceived that their images looked vile and 
black and could not be the beautiful presence 
that shielded her from the fires of God. She 
began to experiment with her inner vision, 
and found that when she said to the presence, 
"I know you, I know you," she perceived a 
light; but when she said, "I don't know you, 
I don't know you!" the light went out. At 
last she became aware that it was Jesus who 
was shielding and loving her, and the world 
grew bright, her troubled thoughts were ban- 
ished, and her heart was filled with praise and 
with love for all creatures. "Lord, Lord," she 
cried, "I can love even de white folks." 

Before this time she had not associated the 
name or idea of Jesus with religion. She had 
heard of Him, but she had supposed, she said, 
that He was like General Lafayette or some 
similar character. Now she began to wonder 
about Jesus, and one day she heard something 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 99 

read aloud which led her to ask if Jesus were 
married. She was told that Jesus was God; 
but she could not accept that idea of his nature, 
because she had seen Him standing between 
her and God. In later years she worked out 
for herself the belief that Christ was in some 
mysterious sense the spirit that was in Adam 
and Eve till they sinned, when it fled to heaven 
and was afterwards reincarnated in Jesus. 
She held, moreover, that men were purely 
animal in their nature until united to the spirit 
of Christ. 

Even in the darkest hours of her early re- 
ligious experience she appears to have had no 
fear of a material hell; and as her mind de- 
veloped she was afraid only of the anguish in 
her own heart, the consciousness of sin and of 
separateness from God. Her views of prayer, 
after the clearer spiritual vision and the deeper 
religious feeling came to her, still remained 
for some time essentially the same as when she 
had thought she must talk aloud to God to 
make Him know that she wanted Him to save 
her from being whipped. While she was try- 
ing to get her child back from Alabama, she 
would say: "Now, God, help me get my son. 
If Jyou were in trouble as I am, and I could help 
you, as you can help me, think I wouldn't do 
it? Yes, God, you know I would do it. I 
will never give you peace till you do, God." 

Isabella's husband died a few years after his 



100 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

emancipation. He was older than she, and 
she could not earn enough to take care of him 
and their children too; so he passed his last 
days in a poorhouse. 

She worked as a domestic servant in New 
York City, and there became associated with 
two men named Pierson and Matthias, who 
claimed, the one to have a mission like that of 
John the Baptist, and the other to be God 
himself on this earth. They had a few follow- 
ers, but their efforts to propagate their notions 
resulted finally in scandal and the suspicion of 
crime. Isabella happily kept clear of all that 
was degrading or immoral in the little com- 
munity of fanatics, but for a time she inclined 
to share in its religious vagaries. Her strong 
common sense, however, quickly asserted it- 
self. She tried abstaining from food because 
Mr. Pierson fasted, and said that the practice 
"gave him great light in the things of God." 
After abstaining from food for three days, 
Isabella become satisfied that all the "light- 
ness" she could obtain in that manner was 
lightness of body and not of mind. 

After she ceased to work for Pierson and 
Matthias, she continued her humble labors in 
New York City for sometime; but a trouble 
came to her spirit. In some vague way her 
untutored intellect conceived the idea that there 
was essential evil in the social systems of the 
day, and especially in the great city where she 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 101 

lived. "The rich rob the poor," she said, 
"and the poor rob one another." She had not 
taken money unless she earned it; but she 
grew to feel that in doing work for which she 
received pay she prevented some one else from 
doing it and obtaining money. Occurrences 
like the following incident disturbed her. A 
gentleman gave her half a dollar to hire some 
man to clear the snow from the sidewalk. She 
rose early, did the work herself and kept the 
money, and then was unable to convince her- 
self that she had not defrauded some poor man 
who needed the job in order to provide for his 
family, although she knew that she also was 
poor and needed the money. She came to feel 
that it was selfish in her to seek for work when 
so many other people were suffering because 
they had no work, and a horror of the whole 
situation took possession of her. She felt that 
she had not obeyed the Golden Rule in her 
dealings with her fellow men; and at last her 
soul submitted itself to a new vision of duty, 
and she cried: "Lord, I will give all back 
that I have ever taken away. Lord, what wilt 
Thou have me to do?" 

The inward answer came, "Go out of the 
city." 

She replied: "I will go — just go. Lord, 
whither shall I go ?" 

Then a voice said, "Go East." 

On the first day of June, 1843, she fled from 



102 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

the city, taking the rising sun for her guide. 
She carried a few clothes rolled up in a pillow- 
case, a basket of food, and in her pocket the 
sum of two shillings. The morning that she 
started she told a woman that her name was no 
longer Isabella, but Sojourner. A Quaker 
lady whom she met early on her pilgrimage, 
inquired what was her second name and 
Sojourner was obliged to admit that she had 
not thought of the necessity of a new surname. 
She had been called by the name of her last 
master in slavery. She seems to have sup- 
posed that God had called her Sojourner and 
whereas she had been pleased with the title, she, 
now felt very dissatisfied, because it did not 
prove sufficient for the requirements of earthly 
customs. She plodded on her road, praying: 
"Oh, God, give me a name with a handle to 
it !" At last she thought that Truth was God's 
name, and God was in deep verity her last 
master, so she must call herself Sojourner 
Truth. "Why, thank you, God," she cried 
joyously, "that is a very good name." 

She went into New England, singing, preach- 
ing, and praying, in religious or reform meet- 
ings, or to gatherings of people assembled 
especially to hear her. She wrote back to her 
children, whom she had left in New York, 
without first divulging her plans to them. 
She kept her moral balance, and was as ready 
to work with her hands as to pray and preach. 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 103 

She lodged where she could. Sometimes she 
paid for her entertainment in labor, sometimes 
in money given for her services, elsewhere 
performed ; but she never allowed herself to 
take more than two or three shillings at any 
one time for any work she had done. 

Her notions of God constantly clarified. 
Once she thought of Him as a being who got 
tired and who could not see by night; but at 
last she worked out for herself the belief that 
He was a spirit above all physical limitations; 
and then she decided that the Sabbath might 
be necessary for the benefit of man, but that it 
could not have been instituted to commemor- 
ate God's rest, because God could not have 
got tired in any work. As this idea indicates, 
she came to hold the opinion that the scriptural 
writers mixed their own notions up with the 
spiritual truths revealed to them. 

Soon after her pilgrimage began she attended 
meetings held by the Second Adventists, and 
was repelled by their noisy and excited ways. 
She told them that "the Lord might come, 
move all through the camp and go away again, 
and they never know it." they were in such a 
state of unspiritual agitation. Once she ex- 
claimed in disgust: "Here you are talking 
about being changed in the twinkling of an 
eye. If the Lord should come, He'd change 
you to nothing, for there is nothing to you!" 
The Second Advent preachers received her 



104 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

opposition kindly, and after some discussion 
with her decided that, though she was ignorant 
of their doctirne, "she had learned much that 
man had never taught her." 

She resided for a while in a community in 
Northampton, and was a servant in that town 
about the year 1850. She had hoped to find 
her ideal of life realized there, but after the 
community broke up she seems to have re- 
signed the expectation or effort to live accord- 
ing to socialistic ideals, and bent some of her 
energy towards getting a home for her old age. 

She gradually became known to the Aboli- 
tionists, and as a speaker against slavery dis- 
played a quaint oratory, and was powerful in 
sudden attacks upon error or an opponent. 
She sang effectively; and an interesting story 
is told of her quieting a mob of rioters who 
were violently disturbing a camp meeting, one 
moonlight night, by going a little way outside 
the assembly and singing: 

"It was early in the morning, — it was early 

in the morning, 
Just at the break of day — 
When he rose — when he rose — when he 

rose, 
And went to heaven on a cloud." 

She never learned to read, but Wendell 
Phillips wrote of her: "I once heard her de- 
scribe the captain of a slave ship going up to 




WENDELL PHILLIPS 
About Sixty-nine Years Old 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 105 

judgment, followed by his victims as they 
gathered from the depth of the sea, in a strain 
that reminded me of Clarence's dream in 
Shakespeare, and equalled it. The anecdotes 
of her ready wit and quick, striking replies are 
numberless. But the whole together give 
little idea of the rich, quaint, poetic, and often 
profound speech of a most remarkable person, 
who used to say to us: 'You read books; God 
Himself talks to me.' " 

Mr. Phillips spoke to Mrs. Stowe of the 
power possessed by the French actress Rachel, 
to overwhelm with emotion a whole audience by 
uttering a few simple words, and said that the 
only other person who could do it as she could 
was Sojourner Truth. 

On one occasion Frederick Douglass was 
addressing an audience in Salem and drawing 
a very gloomy picture of the condition of the 
country, declaring that slavery could only go 
down in blood, and that church and state 
were too deeply steeped in sin to escape. 
Probably something pessimistic in his tone or 
words stirred her religious nature, for sud- 
denly Sojourner rose in the back of the hall 
and startled speaker and audience by crying 
out these words: "Frederick, is God dead?" 

"We were all," wrote Mr. Douglass of the 
scene, "for a moment brought to a standstill; 



106 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

just as we should have been if some one had 
thrown a brick through the window." 

Her religious faith was unfaltering, for she 
believed, as she once said to a friend, "I tell 
you, dear lamb, dat when a thing is done inde 
right spirit, God takes it up and spreads it all 
over the country." 

The veteran Abolitionist, Parker Pillsbury, 
in a letter to the writer, describes a scene in an 
anti-slavery convention held about the year 
1855, in Ashtabula County, Ohio. The 
audience was mostly in sympathy with the 
Abolitionists, Joshua R. Giddings and his 
family being present at the meetings. On 
Sunday afternoon Mr. Pillsbury made a speech 
denouncing "the church and clergy of the 
country as accomplices in the guilt of slave 
breeding and slave holding." A young law 
student arose to defend both cnurch and 
clergy. He said that the negroes were fit 
only to be slaves, and if any of them showed 
intelligence it was because they had some 
white blood, for, as a race, they were but the 
connecting link between man and animals. 
While he spoke a violent thunderstorm came 
up. 

"The house," writes Mr. Pillsbury, "was 
almost as dark as night, except when illumined 
by flashes of lightning. Quite ingeniously the 
young man spoke of the thunder and lightning 
as the voice of God and flash of His eye in 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 107 

indignation at our holding such meetings and 
preaching such doctrines, especially on the 
holy Sabbath day; and he said he was 'almost 
afraid' to be there." 

All the time that he spoke, Sojourner Truth 
sat and looked at him; and when he ended 
she came forward to answer him. "She 
seemed," says Mr. Pillsbury, "almost to come 
up out of the deep darkness or out of the 
ground. There she stood before us as a vision. 
Her tall, erect form, dressed in dark green, a 
white handkerchief crossed over her breast, a 
white turban on her head, with white teeth and 
still whiter eyes, she stood, a spectacle weird, 
fearful as an avenger — doubtless to the young 
man more dreadful than the thunderstorm, 
the clouds of which had not yet cleared away. 
She spoke but a few minutes. To report her 
would have been impossible. As well attempt 
to report the seven apocalyptic thunders. I 
have heard many voices of men and women, 
in a vast variety of circumstances, on land and 
sea, but never a voice like hers then and there. 
She spoke not loud, nor in rage. She was 
singularly calm, subdued, and serene. In her 
peculiar dialect and tone she began: 

" 'When I was a slave away down there in 
New York, and there was any particularly bad 
work to be done, some colored woman was 
sure to be called on to do it. And when I 
heard that man talking away there as he did, 



108 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

almost a whole hour, I said to myself, here's 
one spot of work sure that's just fit for colored 
folks to clean up after.' 

"She referred to the young lawyer's com- 
parison of negroes to the brutes, and cried out : 
'Now, I am the pure African. You can all see 
that plain enough.' She straightened herself 
up proudly and repeated: 'I am the pure 
African; none of your white blood runs in my 
veins.' And then she uttered a fierce scoff at 
the greedy passions of the white race, which 
had made it almost a marvel that any negro 
should be of unmixed blood. She passed on 
to speak of the youth's terror lest God had 
sent the storm in wrath at the opinions ex- 
pressed at that meeting. 'He better be afraid,' 
she cried out contemptuously, 'if the Lord has 
ever heard tell of him yet.' " 

Mrs. Stowe wrote an article about Sojourner, 
which was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 
1863. She says: "I do not recollect ever to 
have been conversant with any one who had 
more of that silent and subtle power which we 
call personal presence than this woman. In 
the modern spiritualistic phraseology she 
would be described as having a strong sphere." 

Mrs. Stowe related Sojourner's history to 
the sculptor, Mr. Story, in Rome. A few 
days afterwards he told her he wanted to make 
a statue to be called the Libyan Sibyl. Two 
years later he asked Mrs. Stowe to repeat the 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 109 

account of Sojourner and describe again her 
manner and appearance; and in a day or two 
more he showed the clay model of his statue, 
in which he typified the mysterious African 
nature, of which this negro woman was such a 
notable impersonation. 

When the civil war came, Sojourner, aged 
as she was, travelled all over the North, speak- 
ing for the Union and freedom. She com- 
posed a battle song for the first Michigan regi- 
ment of colored soldiers, and sang it herself in 
Detroit and Washington. 

"We hear the proclamation, massa, hush it as 

you will; 
The birds will sing it to us, hopping on the 

cotton hill; 
The possum up the gum tree couldn't keep it 

still, 
As we went climbing: on." 

During the war a Democrat once asked her 
what business she was then following. She 
answered; "Years ago, when I lived in de 
City of New York, my occupation was scouring 
brass door knobs; but now I go about scouring 
copperheads." 

In October, 1864, she had an interview with 
Abraham Lincoln from whom she sought 
authority for work among the freedmen. He 
treated her with much consideration, and 
when she told him she had never heard of him 



110 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

till he was a candidate for the presidency, he 
smiled and answered: "I had heard of you 
many times before that." He wrote in her 
autograph book, which she called her "Book 
of Life," and showed her a Bible which had 
been given him by the colored people of 
Baltimore. 

A month later she was commissioned by the 
National Freedmen's Relief Association, and 
spent a year at Arlington Heights, devoting 
herself especially to teaching the freed women 
good household and personal habits. 

The negroes there then held their freedom 
by such an insecure tenure, that Marylanders 
often came over and kidnapped the children; 
and if the bereaved mothers disturbed the 
peace in consequence, they were sometimes 
put in the guardhouse by irresponsible officials. 
Sojourner took up the cause of these outraged 
women so energetically that some angry Mary- 
landers threatened to get her also put into the 
guardhouse. She dared them to try to im- 
prison her, saying that she "would make the 
United States rock like a cradle." 

She visited and nursed in the Freedmen's 
Hospital. While she was thus engaged a law 
was passed giving colored people a right to 
ride in all the street cars. Sojourner was 
speedily seen on the street holding up her old 
black hand as a signal to a car to stop and take 
her on. Conductors and drivers paid no at- 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY m 

tention to her. Two cars passed, and when 
the third came in sight, she "gave three tre- 
mendous yelps: 'I want to ride! I want to 
ride ! I WANT TO RIDE !' " 

A crowd collected, and the car was blocked. 
Sojourner jumped on board. A great shout 
arose from the men on the street. The in- 
furiated conductor told her twice to go for- 
ward where the horses were or he would throw 
her out. She sat down among the passengers 
and told him that she did not fear him, for she 
knew the laws as well as he did. She rode 
farther than she needed to, and finally left the 
car and said: "Bless God! I have had a 
ride." 

Another day a conductor kept her running a 
long way after a car, till the other passengers 
complained aloud that it was a shame. When 
she entered the car at last he came towards her 
with a threatening gesture to put her off. She 
said to him that if he touched her "it would 
cost him more than his car and horses were 
worth." A man in the uniform of a general 
interfered on her behalf, and the conductor 
left her alone. 

Finally, a conductor, unmindful of her great 
age, pushed her against the door so roughly 
that a bone in her shoulder was displaced. 
She had him arrested. The Freedman's 
Bureau furnished her with a lawyer, and the 
man lost his situation. Soon after a conductor 



112 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

was known to stop his car unasked and say to 
some colored women standing timidly upon 
the street: ''Walk in, ladies!" 

Thousands of homeless negroes were swarm- 
ing in that troubled period in the vicinity of 
Washington. Sojourner realized that idleness 
was ruining both adults and children. She 
found places for many in the North, and the 
Government sent them where she directed. 
She advocated the establishment of industrial 
schools and an industrial colony in the West. 
She tried to get Congress to institute such an 
undertaking. She went through many North- 
ern states advocating this plan in public meet- 
ings, and for a number of years continued to 
try to get it adopted. In these journeys she 
was received almost everywhere with courtesy 
and honor. The Abolitionists delighted to 
open their homes to her. In her wanderings 
she was often accompanied by a favorite 
grandson; but she was destined to live long 
after he died. As she grew older what people 
cared most to hear from her lips was the mar- 
vellous story of her own varied experiences. 

Her home in these last years was in Battle 
Creek, Michigan, where she owned a house. 
There in 1883, she died, her age being prob- 
ably a little over or under a hundred years. 
A few days before her death, as she lay on her 
couch with closed eyes, a friend bent over her 
and said: "Sojourner, can you look at me?" 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 113 

Slowly the dying woman opened her wonder- 
ful eyes. They seemed filled with spiritual 
and prophetic light; and earnestly they gazed 
upon the tender face above her. Then they 
closed, never to open again on earth. 



JOHN CRAWFORD WYMAN 

John Crawford Wyman was born in 1822 at 
Northboro, Massachusetts. He narrowly es- 
caped being trained for the Baptist ministry, but 
so escaping, he never went to school after he was 
twelve. He never became a really well-read 
man, nor was he a profound thinker, yet, 
throughout his life, he faced all men with level 
eyes and met respectful glances. He had the 
gift of that fervid, impromptu oratory which is 
best suited for short addresses. He delivered 
them in a marvellous voice which possessed 
the quality that sets to throbbing the pulses of 
the listener. 

He was endowed with a genuine dramatic 
genius. He used it only in amateur fashion. 
He had a curious aversion to making of his 
peculiar genius a marketable commodity, and 
while he frankly enjoyed the use of his own 
powers, he really underrated their possibility 
of development. Moreover he lacked am- 
bition and persistency in such mental effort as 
was not inspired by his affections or his moral 
sentiments. So he flashed like a benign 
meteor from an intellectual nowhere, to 
nowhere, while the great human planets 
rolled in their self determined orbits. 

114 




Jk*+£./fr 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 115 

When he was twenty-four, he married Emma, 
the daughter of Dr. Willard of Uxbridge. 
She was beautiful and had the power to win 
and hold ardent devotion. She influenced 
him greatly and nobly, though she was several 
years older than he and soon became a chronic 
invalid, whose support taxed all his young 
ability. 

For some years he resided in Worcester, and 
it was in this period that, overflowing with 
amusement, he said one day to the Concord 
Sage. 

"I have just met a man who says, 'there 
ain't no savin' grace in them words of Mr. 
Emerson's.' " 

Whereat Mr. Emerson made slow and ap- 
parently reflective reply, "I think he is about 
right." 

John Wyman was a member of the Town 
and Country Club, founded in 1849 by Mr. 
Emerson. Not four weeks before his own 
death, Col. Higginson wrote to John Wyman's 
widow, "I remember full well your brilliant 
husband and how Mr. Emerson used to de- 
light in him and ask 'where is he ?' when miss- 
ing him from literary meetings.' " 

Emma Wyman was a Garrisonian Aboli- 
tionist, and her husband joined that non-voting 
phalanx, and though for a very brief time in 
the early days of the Free Soil Party, and again 
in the Presidential campaign of 1860, he 



116 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

wavered from it into the political ranks, he was 
all his life proud because his main anti-slavery 
connection had been Garrisonian. Many di- 
verse opinions prevailed as to the legal relation 
of the Federal government to slavery, so that 
a little wavering between these opinions and 
consequent change in action, such as this of 
John Wyman's, while perhaps it implied some 
lack of intellectual certainty, did not in his 
case imply moral flexibility. 

He was in the employ of Phillips and Samp- 
son when they started the Atlantic Monthly. 
Edmund Quincy offered an anti-slavery ar- 
ticle entitled Where Will It End? for] pub- 
lication in one of the first numbers of the 
magazine. The publishing and editorial au- 
thorities on the management were not all 
in accord as to the character which they 
should impose upon the new magazine. Lowell 
and Underwood were ready and probably eager 
to make it an engine for carrying the Gospel 
of Freedom over the whole country, but 
the decision did not rest entirely with them 
and one of their superiors in management 
was unalterably opposed to the publication 
of Quincy's article. There was however an- 
other man in authority who was then ill at 
home in a rural district some miles from Bos- 
ton. John Wyman got the idea that this 
man might be influenced. He secured a 
buggy and in the evening of the day in which 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 117 

matters had become critical upon the subject, 
he drove out into the country, found his man] 
assured him that the hour had come to issue 
a great anti-slavery monthly, argued, ex- 
horted, very likely jested, and won. He 
returned to Boston with the order which 
check-mated the opposition, Quincy's article 
appeared, and thereby the mighty force of 
The Atlantic Monthly was hitched like Emer- 
son's "wagon to a star." 

John Wyman was, by this time, what 
Higginson pronounced "a wonderful artist" 
in telling a story, though that competent critic 
considered "his original sayings finer (even) 
than his recitations," and "John, I have a capi- 
tal story I want to give you to work up," thus 
Wendell Phillips greeted him. He attended 
the famous Atlantic Monthly dinners, where 
once he heard Oliver Wendell Holmes say 
briskly. 

"Mr. Longfellow, what do you do when 
people write to you for your autograph ?" 

"Well," answered the poet gently, "If they 
send stamps, I usually return autographs." 

"Do you?" in his gravest manner asked 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Z rely on stamps so 
acquired to pay my own postage." 

John Wyman made a speech in The Wig- 
wam at the close of the Chicago Convention 
which nominated Lincoln, — that meeting 
of which Mary A. Livermore said, "Talk of 



118 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

women as too emotional to take part in poli- 
tics! I never saw women behave as men did 
that night in the Wigwam, — jumping, hug- 
ging, and rolling over each other.!" 

Emma Wyman died in December, 1861, 
and then the man who need no longer give his 
strength to her care, recognized his duty, "I 
have talked against slavery," he said, "Now I 
must work." 

He insured his life for his mother's benefit 
and entered the 33rd Massachusetts Volunteers 
with the rank of Captain. He was almost im- 
mediately detached from his regiment and ap- 
pointed provost marshal at Alexandria, Virginia, 
where a vast, dusky congregation went mad 
with joy because he assured them that in his 
rule, he should make no distinction between 
black and white. He kept his pledge, and — 
"You're the first officer in this town that ever 
took a nigger's word against a white man's," 
was the comment on his conduct. 

It was not always easy, in those days, for the 
civilian soldier to grasp instantly the whole 
bearing of the military situation upon himself. 
Soon after John Wyman's arrival in Alex- 
andria, he went to Washington. On his re- 
turn, he was summoned into the presence of 
his commanding General who asked sternly. 

"Capt. Wyman, why did you leave your post 
of duty without permission ?" 

The nature of his action revealed itself for 




EhmaWillard Wyhan 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 119 

the first time to the offender's consciousness. 

"Well," he said, "I think I went because I 
have been a citizen for forty years, and a 
soldier only about a month." 

His frank wit and his own charm saved him, 
— the General laughed. 

The proclamation of martial law in Alex- 
andria was resented by the residents and a 
group of young men of aristocratic families 
entertained themselves by making trouble for 
the Yankee provost marshal. An insult offered 
on the street to a beautiful quadroon girl made 
occasion for the arrest of the ringleader of the 
party of hot-blooded young men. 

The man in jail was freely visited by his 
friends and, after a time, he had them announce 
that unless he was liberated so he could go to 
New York to spend Christmas with his fiancee, 
he would shoot the provost marshal when he 
did get out. After hearing of this threat, 
Capt. Wyman visited the jail and asked the 
young man if it were true that he had made 
such a threat. Upon the admission, Captain 
Wyman said quietly. "I'm sorry you said that," 
The defiant response came, ' I said it and I 
mean it," but when the gentle voice continued 
slowly; "I'd like to let you go and spend 
Christmas with the girl, but, don't you see, 
you have made it so I can't ? " the Southerner 
realized that there was no more cowardice in 
the Northern blood than in his own. 



120 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

The two men became good friends and the 
jail door was set open as soon as Christmas 
was over. 

During Captain Wyman's service as provost 
marshal, it was announced to him that the 
President, with attending party was to visit 
the town and take a horse-back ride of inspec- 
tion. Capt. Wyman ordered horses got ready 
in number to match the expected dignitaries, 
and being mindful of Abraham Lincoln's 
inches, he included among the animals selected, 
a very tall though somewhat bony and un- 
gainly steed. He had however no intention of 
trying to suggest a choice to the President. The 
horses were brought up to the Marshal's office 
at the proper moment. Capt. Wyman came 
out with the President and his suite, Lincoln 
gave one comprehensive glance at the saddled 
steeds, and walked straight to the big gaunt 
creature, saying, "I think this one looks as 
though it was meant for me." 

Capt. Wyman came once again in contact 
with this man of enigmatical character, who 
has since become almost a mythical personage 
to common imagination. The Captain was 
sent to him at the White House; and was alone 
with him for a few minutes, then a Congress- 
man from the far West came in, and Lincoln 
joked about mileage perquisites, and told a 
not very remarkable story of his own Con- 
gressional time as related to mileage privilege. 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 121 

While, however, Lincoln and the Captain 
were alone together, an incident occurred, ap- 
parently trifling yet suggestive. When the 
business of the interview was finished, the 
President volunteered thus, "Would you like 
to know what the army is doing?" and he 
showed the Captain a marked map and ex- 
plained to him the marks as indicating army 
position in field and camp. Perhaps the in- 
formation thus conveyed was so slight that to 
impart it could have served only to gratify 
Lincoln's love of pleasing a visitor, but it may 
also be that this anecdote illustrates a phase 
of his character which seems intimated by 
Grant in his Memoirs. Grant says that when 
he came to take command of the army, he was 
warned by wise and weary men, not to let the 
President know his plans, "and so," says Grant, 
"I did not tell him." 

In the second year of his service Captain 
Wyman was put on the staff of Gen. Mac- 
Callum, who was at the head of the Depart- 
ment of Transportation and Military Railroads 
for the Eastern Army. This work took the 
staff officer into some scenes of danger. The 
department business, however, included not 
merely the duty of riding at night over derailed 
tracks on newly captured railroads through 
territory still haunted by rebels, but also the 
innocent employment of forwarding supplies 



122 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

to the army, even such as condensed milk and 
desiccated vegetables. 

Capt. Wyman was ordered to report to Gen. 
Sherman at Atlanta. He appeared before the 
General in shabby citizen's dress, and he 
apologized for his clothes. 

"Captain," replied the amiable Conqueror, 
"You may wear what you please, if you will 
get us all the consecrated milk and desecrated 
vegetables we want." 

The Captain asked the happy Marcher to the 
Sea about his recent journey : "It was a picnic," 
laughed Sherman, "A perfect picnic all the 
way." 

After Lee's army disbanded, Capt. Wyman 
met a rebel lad stranded in Richmond, and he 
bought the boy a mule and gave him twenty- 
five dollars in cash so he could go home and 
earn an honest living. But the close of the 
Civil War left the Northern soldier also 
practically penniless. 

He served for a season as clerk of a Con- 
gressional Committee. That winter, a dra- 
matic scene occurred in the Senate Chamber, 
where somebody declared that, in a previous 
session, Charles Sumner had voted to re-admit 
to the Union a State which disfranchised 
colored men. 

"I did not," protested Sumner, and his asser- 
tion was met by retorts equivalent to a storm 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 123 

of "You dids." At last he called for the read- 
ing of the Record. The book was opened, 
there was Sumner's name with NO written 
opposite. 

The next morning, Capt. Wyman said to him 
on a street car, "Mr. Senator, it must have 
been very gratifying to you yesterday to find 
your statement sustained by the Record. " 
"Mr. Wyman,' answered the stately Senator, 
"I had not the slightest recollection of the 
occasion, but / knew I never could have voted 
to admit into this Union a State which brought 
the word 'white' in its Constitution." 

Capt. Wyman thought, "What a thing to 
have a character so sure of itself, that a man 
without memory of the event, would dare call 
for the reading of the record before a Senate 
Chamber full of his peers, ready to scoff at 
him, if its testimony disproved his word." 

John Wyman himself had a character full 
of surprise places. One day, in New York, 
he either lost or was robbed of three hundred 
dollars which chanced just then to be his 
"little all," and he was out of employment. 

A fit of rage seized him. He walked up one 
of the city avenues feeling as though he were 
pushing his way towards nothing through a 
thick, black cloud. A beggar accosted him 
with a whining petition. He ought to have 
been moved either to Christian compassion or 
scientific study of social conditions. He was 



124 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

not so moved. He strode on in sullen silence, 
and the beggar kept at his side reiterating his 
complaining demands, till at last the exas- 
perated mendicant cried out, "Damn 
you, I hope you will be as poor as I am, some 
day." ^Capt. Wyman flashed back unholy 
retort, "Damn you, I am as poor as you are, 
now." 

The astonished beggar departed as though 
he had been shot into distance and the other 
poverty-stricken man strolled on, so delighted 
with the incident and his own speech that life's 
enveloping cloud seemed now only a rose-hued 
mist through which the Future beckoned to 
new gayety. 

His dominant mood was well suggested 
when he once indignantly asked a tradesman 
why he had cheated him, "Well," answered the 
fellow confidently, "I didn't think you were 
the kind of man who would trouble me." 

Jay Gould took a fancy to him, drew him 
aside one day and offered his assistance in 
"the market." Capt. Wyman did not approve 
of Jay Gould, and declined the offer. "Why," 
said the financier, "I could make a million 
dollars for you if I chose." 

"Yes," replied Capt. Wyman, "and then I 
should be at your mercy; you could take it 
away when you chose. If I stay poor, you 
can't do anything to me, and I am your equal." 

For five or six years after 1867, he revelled 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 125 

in the joy of earning a sufficient income. If he 
bought a thousand dollar horse because he 
wanted one, he gave, because he wanted to, a 
thousand dollars to a person who had been 
Emma Wyman's friend. He gave his mother 
a regular allowance, and also a house which 
she willed back to him. This house, which he 
had first given, was the only property he ever 
inherited. Throughout his whole career, like 
a true knight of the Round Table, he "for- 
bore his own advantage," and once he threw a 
fortune, which he might honorably have se- 
cured for himself, into the hands of those who 
were not even akin to him. 

He informally adopted, as though it were a 
near kinsman's, the family of the distinguished 
engineer, Alexander Holley; and during these 
years, what he probably loved best in the 
world, was a child, by whose crib he sat each 
evening for a playful half hour. One day he 
entered the study of the pastor of Plymouth 
Church. 

"The most awful thing has happened," he 
said, "little Alice Holley has died." 

Then he and Henry Ward Beecher sat down 
and cried together. 

In the spring of 1872, I, being twenty-four 
years of age, cherished an appropriately 
girlish ideal. I sat with my mother on the 
deck of the steamer Cuba. A gray haired man 
was passing. He was of medium height 



126 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

stout, ruddy- complexioned and furnished with 
a double chin. He resembled a portrait I had 
seen of George Fox. My mother stopped him, 
asking, "Is thee the John Wyman whose name 
I used to see in the Liberator reports of anti- 
slavery fairs?" "I should say I was," he 
answered with cordial energy, and then with- 
out further prefacing word, continued, "I be- 
lieve Emma Willard was a born Abolitionist. 
Once I went to Uxbridge on the morning of 
Thanksgiving Day, and I found a colored man 
at Dr. Willard' s. He was an agent for some- 
thing, but having done his errand, he did not 
go away. The old doctor grew troubled and 
got me aside to tell me that Emma said if that 
man stayed until the dinner hour, she should 
ask him to come to the table, and he wanted to 
know how I was going to feel about it. I said 
that I thought any table where Emma Willard 
sat was good enough for me or anybody else to 
sit at." 

He seated himself on the deck floor beside 
our party, the same day that he told the above 
story of Emma Willard, and spoke of an hour 
in their married home saying, "Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Wendell 
Phillips were all there to dinner. I have al- 
ways felt that nobody could claim that higher 
honor had been his as host than that, — to 
have had those three men together at his table." 

Once or twice during this voyage, Capt. 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 127 

Wyman made fun of himself, as though he 
had no uneasy fear that his dignity might col- 
lapse like a toy balloon if tossed on the breeze 
of a witticism. 

One day he stood on the deck before me and 
thus told a story of the Nation's tragedy. 

"My last military service was to go on the 
train which carried the body of Lincoln from 
Washington to Springfield. It was like attend- 
ing a funeral all the time for three weeks. We 
saw people kneeling in the field, men dropping 
between the handles of their ploughs as the train 
went by. We stopped in all the large towns 
for funeral ceremonies. At every station we 
were met by mourning crowds and delegations, 
and everybody, everywhere, was crying, and I 
got into such a state that I kept crying myself." 

So, he spoke with the ocean around us. 

What did I do with my tall, slender, poetic 
ideal ? I dropped it over the ship's railing to 
the mermaids. I hope they liked it as much 
as I had. 

A few weeks before Grant's second election 
to the Presidency, he and Capt. Wyman were 
guests of George M. Pullman at Pullman's 
Island in the St. Lawrence River. Others in 
the house party were excited over the daily 
news about election possibilities, but the Presi- 
dent was so unperturbed that Capt. Wyman 
asked Gen. Porter. 

"Does this man realize that he is on trial 



128 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

with the whole country acting as Court ?" 

"Yes," replied Gen. Porter. 

Capt. Wyman afterwards reported Grant as 
a devoted husband, and said, "his children 
tumbled all over him and treated him as though 
he were a foot-ball." 

One day, Capt. Wyman was on the Island 
wharf, when the President and a lady came up 
in a rowboat. She sprang out, and, in so 
doing, upset the tiny skiff. Grant had been 
steering and was sitting in such a cramped 
position that he was whirled into the water, 
and the boat turned over him. He was really 
in danger, but Capt. Wyman got at him and 
pulled him out. Grant came up to the surface 
with his extinguished cigar held firmly in his 
teeth, and his rescuer informed him that he 
had never before seen him carry an unlighted 
cigar. On the way back to the house, the 
dripping President said, "The papers will say 
I fell in because I was drunk." The papers 
did say so, but it was not true. 

Capt. Wyman and I were married in 1878. 
Wm. Lloyd Garrison was one of the few wed- 
ding guests. The death of an anti-slavery 
friend prevented Wendell Phillips from being 
present. He wrote instead to me, "Mr. 
Wyman and I were friends." 

To live with John Wyman was like living in 
an iridescent atmosphere, so constantly gleam- 
ing were his changeful fancies. He was the 



vv 







• 









VALLEY FALLS RESIDENCE OF JOHN C. WYMAN 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 129 

most; spontaneously witty person in ordinary 
conversation I ever knew. Mark Hanna, 
when with him, could match him in a duel of 
repartee, but his talk, was not, I think, so uni- 
versally flooded with humor. Capt. Wyman 
used his wit only for genial beneficence, never as 
a weapon in real warfare. He was never sar- 
castic, and he had no black, melancholy drop 
in his temperament such as often lurks under 
the humorous imagination. 
, -.His were abiding constancies of the heart, 
yet there was an elusive element in his nature, 
which made him seem at times like a phantom 
fleeting from the mental grasp of whomever 
would have held him. On the other hand, he 
was never half-hearted or uncertain of his 
loves or his hatreds, — but he loved to be loved, 
and he felt affectionate kindliness towards 
most people. 

Capt. Wyman was fifty-seven when his only 
child was born. He took his belated father- 
hood seriously enough, but also a little whimsi- 
cally. He said, "if the boy ever inherits 
property, I hope he willl consider that he holds 
it as a trust, and not merely for his own use," 
and he said also, "I am old enough to be the 
child's grandfather, and I wish I were. 
Then I could have all the fun of owning him, 
and his father would have the responsibility 
instead of my having it." He commented on 
the difference he discovered between his real 



130 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

experience and his previous imagination of it, 
saying, "I always felt sure that if ever I had a 
boy I should know how to train him properly, 
and that I could and would do it. I find that 
I can't, — and that in all my calculations as 
to the management of my child, I had omitted 
to reckon in one important factor. I had left 
out the child's mother!" 

Every appeal from childhood touched him. 
The street newsboys ran affectionately as well 
as enterprisingly after him. Boys and girls 
in many families not his kin, called him uncle, 
and the family baby of his inner circle, when 
he was more funny than usual, said serenely, 
"Uncle John, I didn't know you was such a 
fool," and met gracious response. He had 
passed his sixty-seventh year, and had just 
returned from a fatiguing journey when he re- 
ceived a queerly-spelt letter from a six year old 
infant. "Uncle John, will you come and get 
me and take me to Wianno ? Will you tele- 
graph first, so I can have time to pack my 
Bag?" 

The veteran did not hesitate. He hated a 
dusty summer drive but he mounted the next 
stage for the distant railroad station. He 
travelled a hundred miles in August weather 
to deposit a black-eyed boy where that imp" of 
mischief wished to be deposited. 

Capt. Wyman read aloud with marvellous 
effect of beauty. Like The Lost Chord is now 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 131 

to memory his recitation, in a twilight hour 
among the White Hills, of Emerson's poem 
beginning : 

"Fixed on the enormous galaxy 
Older and more steadfast seemed his eye." 
And never again will the story of Browning's 
Pompilia thrill to mortal ears, as I once heard 
it, borne upon the cadence of John Wyman's 
voice. In his young time, Lowell had urged 
him to become an actor, and later, Joseph 
Jefferson said, "that had he gone on the stage 
the rest of us would have had to walk behind." 
To me, once, Ellen Terry said, "I love your 
husband's genius." 

Capt. Wyman met Irving in London in 
the first part of the 1880 decade, and Irving 
then introduced him to Ellen Terry. One or 
two years later I was with him in a Providence 
theatre where Irving, not then Sir Henry, was 
playing Louis the Eleventh. He recognized 
the Captain in the audience and sent for him 
to come behind the scenes. The two men meet- 
after that as frequently as circumstances per- 
mitted, in this country and in England, Sir 
Henry paid to his friend attention, which I can- 
not forbear noting in some detail, because it 
showed a quality of tender consideration as from 
a younger to an elder, as well as the inevitable 
liking of one agreeable man of genius for 
another. Sir Henry said in an anxious tone, 
"You will not try to ride a bicycle, will you ?" 



132 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

He showered theatre seats and boxes upon 
him. He invited him to suppers, provided a 
midnight carriage, and went with him to its 
door to see that he got safely into it; he sent a 
farewell telegram, and filled the Captain's sick 
room with flowers. 

Once Capt. Wyman heard him discussing 
with a play- writer a proposed plot. The main 
subject was the struggle between labor and 
capital but the author had represented a would- 
be seducer on the capitalist side of the action. 
"Why do you bring in such a theme ?" said Sir 
Henry, "It is not needed. It is very unpleas- 
ant. Leave it out." 

Of Ellen Terry, who was then Mrs. Wardell, 
Sir Henry said to me, as we sat opposite her 
and Capt. Wyman at Sir Henry's own dining 
table, "I never saw such a mother. She is one 
of God's creatures." 

In that same hour, he said, ''A long time ago 
a young man came to England and played 
Hamlet. I took the part of Laertes, and did 
not see quite the whole of his representation, 
but, in what I saw, he gave the brooding and 
mysterious quality of Hamlet's character better 
than any one else I ever saw. It was Edwin 
Booth." 

I described to Sir Henry the way Modjeska, 
as Lady Macbeth, wailed out the words, "But 
in them Nature's copy's not eterne," and I told 
him that, it seemed evident to me, that Mod- 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 133 

jeska considered that speech as a cry of de- 
spair; that she spoke and acted as though a 
sudden realization had come to her, that 
Macbeth meant to murder Banquo and Fleance, 
that they did not possess earthly immortality, 
and that she herself was powerless to check 
her husband's murderous impulses which were 
now passing far beyond her original intention, 
and exciting pain and horror in her mind. 
This interpretation agreed with Sir Henry's 
own conception of the comparative guilt of 
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, but Ellen Terry 
in her representation had followed Fletcher's 
theory and had spoken that mysterious sen- 
tence in a careless, business-like tone, as though 
she meant merely to suggest to Macbeth that 
he need not worry because natural events 
might remove all cause for jealousy of Banquo. 
Modjeska's interpretation was new to Sir 
Henry, and he seemed much impressed by it. 
"Perhaps that is the true meaning," he said, 
"How do we know ? Mod jeska is a charming 
actress. I wish you would tell that to Miss 
Terry. She would be interested to hear it." 

Later in this same day, Sir Henry sat 
alone with Capt. Wyman. It was near the 
end of the latter's life. 

"You have always been very kind to me," 
said Capt. Wyman. "I don't see why." 

Sir Henry laid his hand on his companion's 
knee and answered. 



134 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

"You are one of the men I love." 
Capt. Wyman became a resident of Rhode 
Island in 1882, and so remained until his death 
in 1900. He served a term in the Legislature, 
and he was Rhode Island Commissioner at the 
Columbian and two or three other expositions. 
He was in constant demand as a speaker for 
both gay and serious occasions. His social 
experience was wide in his later as in his earlier 
years. Lord Randolph Churchill was "Ran- 
dolph" to him, and in Washington he sprang 
from his carriage into the street to clasp the 
hand of Frederick Douglass. Yet admiring 
men in New Orleans decorated him as "Duke 
of Lincoln" when he attended their Carnival 
festivities, and during the brief period in which 
it was possible to be such, he was the sympa- 
thizing friend in this country of the Russian 
Revolutionist, Sergius Stepniak. 

This mysterious person was a man appar- 
ently about forty-five years old when he came 
with his wife for a brief lecturing and propa- 
gandist effort in America. He had the simple 
and childlike manner which pre-eminently char- 
acterizes the European man of talent. He 
made no secret of the fact that Stepniak was a 
name he had assumed. He told, either di- 
rectly or by implying reference, certain things 
about himself, and he told, so far as I know, 
nothing more definite. He had become a 
Russian reformer in his early youth, not, he 








'Jtwf>' 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 135 

said, because of any special virtue in himself, 
but in obedience to a sense of duty which had, 
as it were, descended upon the youth of his 
class and generation, — the duty to atone to 
the Russian peasantry for their own immunity 
from the hardships which those people had 
suffered. 

He had, he said, adopted the peaceful 
methods of the early day of the reforming effort. 
He had gone about among the peasants trying 
to teach and help them. The Government 
had interfered, and the Russian political and 
social reformer had become the Nihilist and 
the Terrorist. He thoroughly disapproved of 
Terrorism in any country where any freedom 
of speech obtained. He had left Russia for 
reasons connected with the Revolution. He 
had often secretly returned, but it was fully 
understood that he could not go there openly. 

In his exile, he had developed ability as a 
writer, and "it had been decided" that his best 
work was to live outside of Russia and try to 
influence opinion in Europe and America. 
He himself felt that he would have preferred 
to remain in Russia and do the more dangerous 
labor there, because it seemed manlier to him. 

Intellectually, Stepniak was a great literary 
critic and a very great writer upon political 
themes and national characteristics. He was 
also a powerful delineator of personalities 
which he had known. 



136 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

His wife was a beautiful womanly creature, 
with a soul full of noble ardor and lovely 
tenderness, and both he and she were rather 
singularly endowed with that indescribable 
quality which arouses affection, almost con- 
temporaneously with first acquaintance. 

A few years after their return to England, 
his dead body was found on a railroad track 
near London, and there were those who believed 
that he had not met with an accidental death. 

On one charming day Capt. Wyman and I 
were members of a lunch party at Gov. 
Claflin's Mt. Vernon Street residence. That 
perfect hostess, Mrs. Claflin, diffused good 
cheer around the table. The other guests 
were Mrs. Margaret Deland, Mrs. Alice Free- 
man Palmer, and Prof. Francis Moulton of 
England. Prof. Moulton discussed Shakes- 
peare, and informed me that he had long since 
adopted the theory that Macbeth was far 
wickeder than Lady Macbeth who was, in his 
opinion, prompted to evil mainly by ambition 
for her husband rather than for herself. Capt. 
Wyman uttered witticisms, told stories and gave 
character delineations, to the great delight of 
everybody, but especially of Mrs. Palmer. I 
never saw any person who seemed more sym- 
pathetically and immediately responsive to the 
influence of his genuis. It was a rare scene, — 
the intellectual woman convulsed with happy 
laughter, the dramatic raconteur stimulated 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 137 

by her appreciation till his whole being ap- 
peared illuminated into a sort of throbbing 
radiance. 

After the lunch Mrs. Palmer walked with us 
along Beacon Street, to the dwelling of Mrs. 
Julia Ward Howe. There we met Sergius 
Stepniak who unfolded to the company his 
plan for the formation of a Society of American 
Friends of Russian Freedom, and also ex- 
plained "Nihilism. " "Do not judge us for 
our resort to terrorism" said Stepniak there 
as he had said before at a reception at Capt. 
Wyman's, "you cannot understand. It is 
war we are waging. I do not ask you to ap- 
prove, — merely, not to condemn." 

The desired Society was formed, and Capt. 
Wyman retained his interest in it. Colonel 
Higginson was its president, Edwin D. Mead, 
Arthur Hobart, and Mrs. Howe were among 
its officers and Mr. Frank J. Garrison became 
its most active and influential member, while 
Stepniak passed onward to his tragic doom. 

Some one on this day at Mrs. Howe's sug- 
gested that Stepniak could make his effort 
more acceptable to certain classes in America, 
if he would refrain from pledging his projected 
Society to espouse the cause of the Jews in 
Russia, — the Jewish people not being then 
high in American favor. Capt. Wyman, 
trained in the Garrisonian school of ethics, was 
deeply impressed by Stepniak's reply, "I can- 



138 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

not help it. Whether it hurts my work or not, 
we must condemn the persecution of the Jews 
by the Russian Government." 

A few weeks later, Stepniak and his wife 
came for some lovely hours to Capt. Wyman's 
house in Valley Falls. The Russian couple 
were very fond of children. He wanted to 
take Capt. Wyman's little boy with him on a 
visit to Mark Twain, for whom the great 
foreigner felt an enthusiastic admiration. This 
desire could not be gratified and Stepniak 
walked with the boy and his father in a neigh- 
boring grove, and carried the child in his arms. 
Finally, when the hour for departure arrived, 
two children were packed into the carriage 
with Mr. and Mrs. Stepniak, so that they 
might at least accompany him as far as to the 
railroad station. 

Once when walking away from an evening 
meeting at Mrs. Howe's, Frank J. Garrison 
being also with us, Stepniak spoke of the 
Woman's Rights movement and expressed his 
conviction that woman suffrage, as such, would 
never be an issue in Russian politics. He said 
that the Russian women had kept such perfect 
step with the men in the effort for general 
liberty, that he believed they would be en- 
franchised as a matter of course, whenever 
real political freedom was given to the men. 
At this time, Stepniak's opinion was that the 
desired Russian revolution would finally be 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 139 

accomplished by disaffection in the Russian 
army. 

Of Wendell Phillips' allusion, in his Phi 
Beta Kappa oration, to Russian Revolution- 
ists, Mrs. Stepniak said, "His words were the 
first sympathetic ones that came through from 
the outer world to us in Russia. It was 
wonderful to us that he should understand 
and care for us and say such things in our be- 
half, at that early time of our work." 

The group of Stepniak's American friends 
to which Capt. Wyman and I belonged did not 
express, nor I believe, generally feel approval 
of Revolutionary Terrorism, even to the extent 
which Mr. Phillips expressed it, but they be- 
lieved in Stepniak himself, and fully sym- 
pathized with the purpose of the effort to ob- 
tain a change in the Russian governmental 
method. 

Capt. Wyman's admiration for Mrs. Howe 
was fervid. It pleased him to stand up in an 
audience to salute her appearance on the plat- 
form, and her Battle Hymn stirred every fibre 
in the old Abolitionist and soldier. "It sounds 
bigger to me each time I hear it sung than it 
ever did before," he said. Nevertheless, he 
inwardly laughed and afterwards made good- 
humored comment, when her tongue once 
stumbled on to the wrong word, and she in- 
troduced him to some one, saying that she was 
presenting "a very fashionable man." She 



140 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

probably meant to say "popular." He 
thought "fashionable" a singularly inappro- 
priate characterization of his personality. 

While political parties separated and formed 
new combinations around him he remained a 
staunch Republican. He personally esteemed, 
yea, verily loved, some Democrats and "Mug- 
wumps," still, to this particular old Abolition- 
ist, the Democratic party as such was always 
the party of the Wrong, and the "Mugwump" 
was always the party of Unwisdom. Into 
this intellectual easy chair of opinion his 
sweet -natured old age settled comfortably. 
But to his everlasting honor be it spoken, he 
had not one tiny speck of snobbishness in his 
whole being, and he was always true to the 
humanitarianism he had shared with Emma 
Willard. 

"Where can such a man go?" asked a 
doubter of social prerogative when speaking of 
a colored graduate from Harvard. 

"Into my house," answered John Wyman, 
beside whom "Nature might stand up and 
say to all the world, This was a man." 

We passed a summer hour once at Cotuit, 
Massachusetts, in company with Miss Mary 
Wilkins; Capt. Wyman gave some recitations 
and read aloud her story of Gentian. When 
we were to leave, the small feminine creature 
of genius looked earnestly up at the beautiful 
old man and thanked him for the pleasure 




JOHN CRAWFORD VVVMAN 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 141 

which he had given her. The crown of his 
seventy winters was white upon his brow. His 
life was behind him. He turned upon her the 
indescribable tenderness of his smile and said, 
"Ah, my child, you are for all time, — I am 
only for a day." 

Well, perhaps so in one sense, — but what a 
radiant day it was, and when the night had 
fallen, Frank Sanborn borrowed the old phrase, 
and said that John Wyman's death "had 
eclipsed the gayety of nations." 

Then these words were written, "Your hus- 
band's death calls up — Oh, so many memories. 
How much he ever told you about that curious 
Worcester life of the '40's and '50's I do not 
know. But he should have told you how 
much he did to help my people upward and 
forward. 1<Edward £ ^ „ 

"I read with the deepest regret of your sad 
loss. My true sympathy is with you. I re- 
joice that my dear old friend passed so peace- 
fully away. Believe me with kindest feeling, 

ever yours sincerely. 

J Henry Irving. 

"My associations with John were so many 
and varied from the Worcester period onward 
through the Atlantic Monthly period and later, 
that it (his death), seems to me a great sub- 
traction from the world. I always said that 



142 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

the most charming and original compliment I 
ever had — deserved or undeserved — was 
when he said that an ideal public meeting 
would be to have me preside and introduce 
each speaker, and then have each successive 
speech omitted. 

T. W. Higginson." 

"Alas, that I shall not again shake the hand, 
be warmed by the great heart, be charmed by 
the unique personality, be delighted by the 
good sense and wit and humor of my old 
friend. 

Moncure D. Conway." 

"My thoughts go back to the time when 
John's name was familiar to me as a speaker 
at anti-slavery meetings. 

Frank J. Garrison." 
* * * * 

Capt. Wyman's friendship with Rev. Joseph 
H. Twichell, dated back to the war time. He 
himself thus told the story of their meeting. 
"I sat one day in my office at Alexandria, and 
a beautiful young man came in, and said at 
once, 'Are you Mary Holley's John Wyman? 
because I am Mary Holley's Joe Twichell." 

The two men took to each other immedi- 
ately, though Capt. Wyman was a dozen years 
the older. 




Copyright. 1912. by Harper & Brotherg 

REV. JOSEPH H. TWICHEIX, D.D. 

From "'Mark Twain: A Biography" 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 148 

Long afterwards, Dr. Twichell went on 
with the story of that old time, "I saw your 
husband next at Atlanta; I found him there 
surrounded by crowds of men, all following 
him about, listening to him, worshipping him. 
I was jealous; I felt like saying to them, **I 
knew this man before you did!" 

At the funeral Dr. Twichell said of his 
friend. "He did his duty as soldier and citi- 
zen. I saw him first when he was in the prime 
of his radiant manhood. Nothing but good 
came to me from him." 




4 r 

4 






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APPENDIX 

Whatever may have been my fancy, when 
I asked Mr. Phillips about it, I have, today, 
no criticism to make upon his friendship for 
Gen. Butler, or upon any regard he may have 
felt for him, or any belief he may have had 
in him. 

Gen. Butler's character, apart from the 
impression it made on Mr. Phillips, is one, 
concerning which, experts have made and 
may well continue to make differing diagnoses ; 
and it seems to me that Sumner's early one 
is likely to be very nearly correct. He said 
of Butler in 1853, "He is a gallant fellow. 
What a splendid man he would be if he had 
more of the moral in him." 

Unto this "gallant fellow," who was at 
least a man at all times, and not a puppet, 
came the war experience which made of him 
a doer of justice to an oppressed people. 
From the smoke of that experience he emerged 
into public sight as the friend of Wendell 
Phillips. I, for one, am willing that all 
thoughtful students of character and his- 
tory should see those two figures, that of 
Wendell Phillips and of Benjamin F.Butler, 
near each other as the unrolled panorama 

145 



146 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

of the twenty years after the war, occasion- 
ally discloses them to the view. I think such 
a student may comfort himself so far as Mr. 
Phillips is concerned, as Mr. Howells' coun- 
try minister did, when told that the nineteen 
year old "Lydia" was, the only woman on the 
ship" Aroostook." He felt sure that, wherever 
"Lydia" was, she "would exert a good influ- 
ence." I doubt not that Mr. Phillips exerted 
"a good influence" over Gen. Butler; and so 
far as any so-called economic heresy is 
concerned, which they may or may not have 
shared together, I hold that any person who 
considers it a proof of special imbecility or 
ignorance, to advocate any special economic 
theory, which is naturally suggested in a 
time of fluctuating thought or of new ex- 
periment, or which naturally belongs to the 
established order, in any given time or 
country, merely proves himself to be unin- 
formed as to thought and thinkers in rela- 
tion to economic and institutional develop- 
ment. 

Still, after thus endorsing so far as I may, 
Mr. Phillips' friendship with Gen. Butler, 
I feel at liberty to add, that it is not necessary 
that the public should wrongly estimate his 
real attitude toward the General. In this 
respect, he has suffered at the hands 
even of his biographer, George L. Austin. 

In the summer of 1872, Charles Sumner, 



AMERICAN CHIVALRY 147 

gave his approval to the nomination for 
President of Horace Greeley, by the Demo- 
cratic party. Early in the following Sept- 
tember, he went to Europe; the voyage was 
ten or eleven days long. During this time, 
he was nominated for governor of Massachu- 
setts by the Democratic party of that State. 

He did not learn of his nomination until he 
reached England, and he cabled back his 
refusal, but he was the Democratic nominee 
for some time, before his cable was received. 

George L. Austin says in his Life and 
Times of Wendell Phillips ; Page 291 ; 

"In September, Mr. Phillips followed Gen- 
eral Butler, in a speech at Lynn, Massachusetts, 
and again advocated the election of Grant." 
His opening remarks were in a strain of pleasant 
and evidently sincere compliment to Gen. 
Butler, and showed that the two men were 
working and speaking in political harmony, 
but the biographer, after repeating these first 
sentences as direct quotations from some re- 
port of Mr. Phillips' speech, continues thus, 
still in direct quotation from Mr. Phillips. 

"I never found myself before on a Repub- 
lican platform. When I came here tonight, 
as some of you know full well, I came to the 
Republican platform at a moment when the 
greatest, the oldest and most honored 
friend (Gen Butler) of my life has quitted it." 

I do not know, nor does the manner of 



148 AMERICAN CHIVALRY 

printing make it certain,whether Austin or some 
reporter, whom he quoted, inserted the name of 
"Gen. Butler," but the literary style of the 
sentence shows that Mr. Phillips himself could 
not have uttered it, in order to tell the audi- 
ence who was the friend to whom he referred; 
and it is difficult to see how anybody could 
have supposed that he meant Gen. Butler. 

Butler had not quitted the Republican 
party, he was there on the platform beside 
Mr. Phillips, he was not Mr. Phillips' oldest 
friend; their acquaintance began when Butler 
was eighteen years old. 

The one man, in the world at that hour, 
of whom Mr. Phillips could have spoken in 
such phrase, as "the greatest, the oldest 
and most honored friend of my life," and 
who had just quitted the Republican party, 
was Charles Sumner. 

Mr. Phillips and he had certainly known each 
other since they were ten and eleven years old, 
and probably before they were that age. 

Later in the speech, Mr. Phillips spoke of 
"the great, the honored name of the Demo- 
cratic candidate for the governorship of 
this State", this of course was another re- 
ference to Sumner; while one of his refer- 
ences to Butler is thus worded; "I do not 
call my friend, the General, a converted 
Democrat, I call him a sifted Democrat." 

Let honor be given where honor is due. 

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